Chapter 3: Lafayette Rapier

Lafayette Rapier had dreamed of a future in politics when he was a student. He wanted to change the world, to give voice to the voiceless and opportunity to those who had been denied it. He wanted to right wrongs.

And then he met Joe Dale Comer.

Joe Dale approached Rapier their junior year at State College and asked him –- begged him, really –- to manage his campaign for president of the student government association. Rapier had planned to run for the office himself, but Comer would be hard to beat. He was the son of a wealthy lawyer, who was the son of a wealthy planter, who had started the secret society within the Greek system that controlled all of student life and politics. Joe Dale wasn’t just the BMOC, he was royalty. He was tall, good-looking in a ruddy, wholesome way. He was reasonably intelligent from an academic perspective, leaned unexpectedly progressive, was surprisingly kind and inexplicably, stupidly honest.

That race in college changed Rapier’s life. And Comer’s too. Rapier agreed to manage the campaign on one condition: that Comer tell him everything he had ever done that might reflect badly on him. Girlfriends, boyfriends, pornography, drugs, fights, embarrassments, crimes, kinks, secret desires and shames.

“Write down anything that might come back to haunt you,” he told Comer in their first meeting. “I need to know everything. So I can protect you.”

He never thought Comer would actually do it. But Comer nodded. Solemnly. The next day he came to Rapier’s dorm and handed him six pages of confessions hand written on a yellow legal pad, beginning with the first time he touched himself and ending with a three-way that included his sister-in-law and a tight end on the high school football team. Comer withheld no details. He described awkward sexual encounters, petty thefts and a couple of drunken fights that read to Rapier like 2nd degree assaults.

“Don’t tell anybody,” was all Comer said.

“Of course not,” a stunned Rapier replied. “This is for your own protection.”

Rapier had managed that campaign well. Comer won easily, as he likely would have done if he had simply put his name on the ballot and held a kegger. He’d gone on to win a seat on the local school board, with Rapier’s help, and then State Auditor, though he was mediocre at math and unsure what the responsibilities of that job entailed.

“What does the auditor audit,” he’d asked Rapier.

“Nothing, unless I tell you to,” Rapier said.

Rapier had known from the moment Joe Dale handed him that pile of yellow paper that he, Lafayette Rapier, would never run for office himself. He wanted real power, and he knew in that moment that he held the blueprint to it in his hands. Joe Dale might someday reach high office, with his help, but he would forever be beholden to his old friend. Lafayette abandoned political ambition, even his ideology. Politics was just a commodity like any other, subject to the whims of the fickle masses. He would rise above the throng to trade in it, manipulate it. He opened Rapier & Associates right after graduation, and began to manage small races, from constable to city council.

Every time he was approached to run a campaign he began with the same sentence he’d said to Comer.

“Write down anything that might come back to haunt you. I need to know everything. So I can protect you.”

What a bunch of saps. Politicians. They were desperate to please, even more desperate to be loved, prone to sex addiction and drug abuse, pathological in their ability to lie and dissemble. Rapier built files on each of them, at first color coding them by the psychological disorder he imagined them to have.

Narcissistic personality disorder was yellow. Antisocial personality disorder was blue, and green folders were reserved for those he diagnosed as both narcissistic and antisocial. Eventually, all of his folders were green.

Very few candidates were as forthcoming as Joe Dale, but they all wrote down something. A dalliance with a co-worker, perhaps, or a long-hidden criminal record from a misspent youth. Pictures of boys, and girls, and drugs. Lots of drugs and financial crimes.

Rapier got most of those men and women elected with anti-drug, tough-on-crime platforms approved by trailer park Jesus himself. With every campaign, win or lose, he filed those secrets away in his safe.

His business, branded with a logo of a sword, grew over the decades. Rapier was good at what he did. He hired data analysts and social media savants, old school private eyes and experts in military intelligence. He got a few good men and women elected to office, and many more bad men and women. It did not matter to him. They were but a commodity, and he would control both the supply and the demand.

Rapier protected his clients from political foes and journalists looking to drag up their embarrassing pasts, and he would use his knowledge of their misdeeds to control them, subtly or not, when necessary. He got plenty of repeat business, too, even from those he controlled. The politicians began to realize what Rapier had known since college. They had hired him, paid him good money, and handed him the very information he could use to destroy them. But he could make them kings if they kept him happy. And on retainer.

Rapier had managed Ulysses Sherman “Slick” Hogg’s run for the public service commission, which was created to regulate the state’s utilities but was ever packed with industry lackeys who stood staunchly for deregulation. He had urged Hogg to drop the Ulysses and the Sherman and run simply as Slick Hogg on the ballot, because a Slick Hogg is better to voters than a Yankee marauder any day. Hogg refused as a matter of principle, not his only principal but one of only several, and lost. But he came to understand what Rapier did, and how he did it. He decided that he, too, could play the game. He began to do favors for Rapier, who in turn used his influence to place Hogg in strategic but invisible positions of power.

Rapier was a kingmaker and a puppet master and in some cases an executioner. He enjoyed the mystique. He reveled in it, and treated it as an art. He turned half of the office into a dojo. He taught new employees Tai Chi and proven veterans Shaolin Kung Fu. They in turn called him Sensei and bowed when he entered the room. He made all his operatives, including Hogg, read Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” The sign above his door, carved in Asian dragon wood, read “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

Rapier kept his own secrets close, and prized the fact that nobody knew them, or him. He was happy not to be a household name. He could shop at the grocery store without being noticed, dine unmolested in the finest restaurants. His homes were plain, his cars boring. He thought himself a simple man, though he had become the most feared operative in three states.

He smiled about that as he drove to pick up his new burner phone, if Salem Khalidi had managed to find the right address. Rapier wondered out loud if it was time again to move to a bigger office.

“I need a bigger safe,” he thought.