Hardball

I tried to remember the date that Petra had been in my office to use my computer, but I could only guess. It had been around two weeks before the Navy Pier fundraiser. I set up a program to find all the Internet sites visited during those weeks.

While the program ran, I knelt to collect papers from the floor, gathering them in a big bundle and laying them on the couch. One of the documents was the transcript of the Steve Sawyer trial. I flipped through the pages, looking again for my father’s name, but instead “Lumumba” jumped out at me.

“Lumumba has my picture,” Steve Sawyer had said on the stand.

Lumumba: Lamont, in the Anaconda’s secret code. Lamont had Sawyer’s picture. What did that mean? Was it some cryptic way of saying that Lamont had fingered him? Or did it mean he was expecting Lamont to testify for him. As in, Lamont has my picture, Lamont has my back.

I wondered if Curtis Rivers would interpret… Curtis Rivers! I smacked my forehead. African names. Kimathi, that was what Rivers called the man who swept the sidewalk in front of his store. While my Internet-search program was ru

Dedan Kimathi, a rebel leader in Kenya in the 1950s. Feeling a sort of nervous dread, I put the name into the Illinois Department of Corrections database. There he was: January 1967, convicted of murdering Harmony Newsome, served forty years, released a year ago January. No time off for good behavior, often in isolation for unspecified, violent outbreaks. Living since his release on Seventieth Place, at the same address as Fit for Your Hoof.

I stared at the screen for a long time, remembering Rivers’s fury when I’d asked where to find Steve Sawyers, of Hammer Merton’s scorn when I asked him the same question.

My brain was frozen. I couldn’t concentrate on those old Anacondas or Miss Claudia’s dying needs. If Petra hadn’t gone missing, I’d have driven straight to Curtis Rivers’s shop and camped out until he and Kimathi-Sawyers emerged. And then I’d have energetically convinced them to tell me what had happened to Lamont-Lumumba. But Petra was fragmenting my mind and sapping my energy.

I closed the browser window. The search program had finished, turning up over a thousand URLs for the ten days I’d bracketed. I started scrolling through them, startled to see the amount of time I spent on the Internet. It took about twenty minutes for me to find where Petra had been, but, once I got there, it was dead easy to follow her in. She’d been updating her MySpace pages. She hadn’t logged in as Petra Warshawski. Instead, her page was called “Campaign Girl.”

I had to create my own MySpace page to look at Petra’s. I signed up under Peppy’s full name, Princess Scheherazade of DuPage, and even created an e-mail address for her. I began to see why people liked using the site. The process of making up Peppy’s biography and interests, the music she listened to-currently, “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog”-took me away from my dark, disaster-filled office and my fears for my cousin’s safety. For twenty minutes, I was in a fantasyland of my own creation.

Campaign Girl loved Natalie Walker’s Urban Angel. She had five hundred friends. To read the messages they sent her, I needed Petra’s password. Trying to figure that out would require either better computer tracking skills or more inside knowledge of Petra than I had. I concentrated on the posts she’d made on her profile page.

She started by explaining that she had to post anonymously because she was working on an important Senate campaign and if she said anything under her own name, or her candidate’s name, she could get both of them in trouble.

“So I’m just Campaign Girl for now. And all of you homeys out there, PLEASE don’t screw up and call me by my real name. Not unless you want me to lose my job. And that goes quintuple for you, Hank Albrecht, wanting stuffy old Janowic to win. My boy is going to beat yours with one hand behind his back. And I have a bottle of beer riding on it.”

I looked up Hank Albrecht, one of Petra’s “friends.” He had gone to college with my cousin and was in Chicago working for the incumbent.

A few days later, Petra was writing about the work she was doing for Brian, whom she scrupulously only called “My Candidate.”

I know all you vegans out there think I’m the wickedest person on the planet, but I love being the meat queen, showing up at a Sunday barbecue loaded down with ribs and sausages. Mostly, it’s for my teammates on the campaign. Whoever thought work would be this much fun?? I’m, like, doing blog searches to see who has bad stuff to put out against My Candidate, like anyone could, and the whole world wouldn’t know it was the biggest crock ever. But everyone who meets My Candidate thinks Mr. President four years down the road, so we have tons of media and money and everything. And I’m, like, Saint Joan on a charger, going out and looking for dragons who want to attack us.

It wouldn’t take a sophisticated code breaker to realize who Petra was, or who her candidate was, based on her posts. In fact, as I skimmed the comments, it was clear that many of her MySpace friends knew that the candidate was Brian. There was competitive ribbing from Hank Albrecht, the guy working for the incumbent. There were passionate pro-Brian posts. And then there were quite a few people who wrote about altogether unco

Petra wrote about Mr. Contreras and me. I was code-named DC, for “Detecting Cousin.”

Every now and then I go over to see Uncle Sal, not that we’re really related, and DC, who really is my cousin. She’s, like, almost my mom’s age, isn’t that weird? Uncle Sal, who my detecting cousin only calls “Mr. C.,” he can’t get enough of my dad’s company’s ribs or of me. My cousin is jealous of me, isn’t that fun? Uncle Sal likes to flirt with me, and it used to be her, you know. Sometimes they seem like an old married couple having the same kind of squabbles everyone’s parents do. Oh my God, we all may end up like our parents, isn’t that freaky?

I went over yesterday, and Uncle Sal was scolding DC for wanting to go talk to this old gang leader who’s doing a hundred years for murder or whatever. And she’s, like, it bugs me that people are too pissed off at me to answer the simplest questions, and I’m, like, so put on your big-girl underpants and move on. And Uncle Sal thought that was hysterical and laughed his head off. So DC got really huffy but was trying not to show it. I mean, I thought being a detective was more dramatic, like solving murders, collecting clues, not going out to prison to talk to some kind of ignorant black gangbanger.

I remembered that episode, and it made me angry that Petra had put it out for the whole world to read about. I made a face at the computer screen. “Put on your big-girl underpants now, V.I.,” I muttered, and read on.

I focused on her posts about the work she’d done for Brian, wondering if any of dragons she’d been sent to slay would turn out to be biting back, but they seemed i

She’d written about DC breaking into her apartment the night she dropped her keys by the front door. And then we came to the Navy Pier fundraiser.

We had this huge fundraiser, and I am, like, a superstar because My Candidate chose one of my guests for his big photo op. My guest was a World War II hero, and he wore all his battle medals and everything, and was on the front page of a bunch of papers, including the Washington Post, which my dad always says is a liberal rag, but it’s so important. Anyway, I’m, like, a star at the campaign, even though it was a total fluke, but the head of the campaign, who we all call the Chicago Strangler, was superimpressed and pulled me out of the NetSquad to do special assignments directly for him. Some of my coworkers are a little huffy, ’cause some of them have been with My Candidate from Day 1, and I’m a Joanie-come-lately. But, well, that’s life.