Read Online The Boiling Season by Christopher Hebert - Free Book Online

that he had been running, but there was scarcely any blood in his cheeks.
    The Senator laced his fingers atop his head. “What a waste,” he sighed, and with an uncharacteristically tired shuffle he slipped back into his office and closed the door.
    We had no place to be until lunch, so I returned to my seat in the lobby, still not entirely clear about what had happened. It all seemed vaguely unreal. Why could they not see where this would lead and simply return to their classes? What did they possibly think they would gain?
    It was only eleven o’clock when Senator Marcus appeared in the doorway and announced it was time to leave.
    â€œWhere are we going?” I asked.
    â€œAn appointment,” he muttered. His hat sat crookedly upon his head.
    Even once we were in the car, the Senator would not say where the appointment was.
    â€œJust drive,” he said, but when I started down the road away from the palace, he made me turn around.
    â€œPerhaps it would be best if we avoided the square,” I suggested, but the Senator mumbled that I should go.
    The police were mostly gone, although a few remained, smoking with their backs to the iron fence surrounding the grass and the fountain. As we drove past, they barely lifted their eyes. At their backs a single blue balloon tied to the fence tried to tug itself free from its tether.
    It was as if nothing at all had happened, as if the bodies still lying on the blood-stained cement were entirely in our imagination. I counted four, but there could have been others. They lay as they had fallen, uncovered, baking in the sun. And there was more blood still, clots of it splattered in the street, but whomever it belonged to appeared to have gotten away.
    â€œThe reporters got their wish,” Senator Marcus observed as we went around the bend. “Plenty of bloody photos to send back home to their editors.”
    All I could think to say was, “What a waste.”
    Despite the coverage of the student deaths, over the next several days the protests spread. Several unions joined the students. There were so many people in the streets surrounding the National Palace that it became nearly impossible to drive, and I had to seek out lengthy alternate routes whenever we needed to go anywhere.
    Stores along the waterfront, many of them favorites of Mme Marcus, closed out of fear of looting.
    Within Senator Marcus’s household, we had always been able to sense when something was wrong, even when we were uncertain what it might be. Perhaps the same could be said of most households, for servants are invariably the first to feel the effects of a master’s foul temper. But what made Senator Marcus unique was that he threw no fits or tirades. With him, the signs were always subtle: the amount of food untouched on his plate; the severity with which he knotted his ties. They were signs that, had the Senator been less kind, we never would have noticed. That he displayed none of these during this period I took as an indication that everything was as it should be.
    Yet over the next few weeks conditions continued to worsen. One afternoon toward the end of May there was another violent clash between protesters and police, and that night I heard the Senator inform Mme Marcus that the president was shutting down the newspapers and all but the government-run radio station until the state of emergency was over.
    The next day, President Mailodet made use of another of his new constitutional powers—one never mentioned in any of his speeches—calling in the army to patrol the streets.
    On the first Wednesday in June, I was sitting in the anteroom of Senator Marcus’s office, waiting to drive him to his tennis match, when one of his clerks—a thin, forgettable young man—came rushing through the door. Seeing the dazed look on his face, the secretary came forward to see what was wrong. Someone went to get the Senator, and the clerk was rushed into the