The Wrath of Angels

‘No, the last one, the one I just drank from.’

‘Force of habit.’

‘He winked at me while he did it.’

‘Maybe he likes you.’

‘Jesus. You think he did something with this one too?’ Tate eyed the bottle suspiciously. ‘Maybe his finger isn’t the only thing he tries to put in bottles.’

‘I got a wipe, if you want to use it.’

‘It’ll make the beer taste bad. Maybe not as bad as if the bartender stuck his dick in it, but still bad.’

‘You’re overreacting.’

‘He recognizes me. I’m sure that he does. He did that deliberately because he thinks I’m a homophobe.’

‘You are a homophobe.’

‘That’s not the point. I should be able to express my opinions without fear of queer bartenders sticking their fingers, or anything else, in my beer. He could have a disease.’

‘You told me he sucked his finger after you drank from the bottle, not before. If anyone’s going to catch anything, it’s him.’

‘What are you, an epidemiologist? And what’s that supposed to mean anyway? You implying that I have something he could catch?’

‘Paranoia, maybe.’

‘I’m telling you, he knows who I am.’

‘It would be great if he did,’ said Becky, and the sarcasm distracted him from fingers and bottles. ‘If every bartender in New York recognized you it would mean that you were a national figure, and all of your problems would be solved.’

‘You mean “our” problems, right?’

Becky sipped her drink. ‘Of course. I misspoke.’

Tate folded his arms huffily and turned away from her, then quickly reconsidered as he found himself catching the bartender’s eye again. Becky swore softly. It was up to her to make some conciliatory gesture. It always was. Sometimes she wished Barbara Kelly had never asked her to take Tate under her wing. He had seemed to be on the verge of breaking through in a big way, at least until recently, but he was a miserable, whiny sonofabitch. It came with the territory. You couldn’t spend hours every day spitting out that kind of bile, then more hours working up more bile to spit out the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, and not pollute your spirit. Although she’d never told Tate this, there were times when she muted the volume in the producer’s booth to give her a break from his poisonous rants, and she agreed with most of what he said. She couldn’t have done the job otherwise. At least Tate represented only part of her responsibilities. In a way, being his producer was little more than a cover story for her.

‘You smell smoke?’ asked Tate. He was sniffing the air like a rat, his head slightly raised. He had even lifted his hands from the bar, and they hung in front of his chest like paws.

‘What, like fire?’ she said.

‘No, tobacco smoke.’ He peered over the top of the booth, but there was no one nearby. They’d chosen the table for precisely that reason. ‘Stinks like cleaning out time at the lung cancer ward.’

For someone who was ostensibly a libertarian, Tate had his peculiarities and inconsistencies. Like so many of those who described themselves as pro-life, Tate was only pro the kind of life that was curled up in someone’s womb. If it emerged from that same womb and committed a crime, then it was fair game for the needle. Similarly he was inordinately fond of war, as long as that war involved kicking someone’s ass in a place 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 was a change coming, and voices like his needed to be heard if that change was to become permanent. She said that there were powerful, influential figures with an interest in ensuring this was the case, and they had favors to call in, and money to spend. Davis Tate didn’t have to spend the rest of his career broadcasting out of a roach-filled studio in Valley Hi, driving between it and his similarly roach-filled apartment in Camelot in his piece-of-shit Concord hatchback. He could become a big player in syndicated talk radio if he wanted to be. He just had to trust in others to guide him.

Tate might have been a serious hatemonger-in-waiting, but he wasn’t dumb. Even back then he was self- aware enough to know that, at best, most of what he said didn’t make a whole lot of sense and, at worst, was just damned lies, but he’d been saying it all for so long that even he was starting to believe it. Neither was his ego so out of control as to allow him to think that a northern dyke would come all the way to San Antonio just because of