Oliver Benjamin
Then I took off my shirt and wrote ‘Don’t Fuck the Poor,’ on my chest
and zipped into the demonstration, marching next to her. I told her
in a panic that the police were coming to crack down on us for staging
an illegal demonstration, and she got scared. Prisons in Brazil are no
holiday, you know. I said I knew where we could hide, so we ran off
together to an upper-floor café with a terrace, where we watched the
scene unfold below. The police attacked the hippies with batons and
arrested a few of them. The rest scattered like rats. She was so
grateful that she agreed to have dinner with me. Then we had
breakfast. The rest is history.”
Roy looked up from his notes. “You’re a hero. But I don’t
understand, how did you know the police were going to attack
them?”
Bidden threw a coffee bean in the air and caught it in his mouth.
“Because I paid them to,” he said. The bitter seed shattered against
his capped teeth.
“There’s third-world justice for you,” Roy shrugged.
“They deserved worse,” Morris replied, “a punishment sadly
beyond my means. They should have been stripped of their passports
and condemned to live like the very peasants they idolize. They didn’t
know any better than anyone else how to help the poor. Most of that
hippie nonsense just makes their situation worse.” He spit the seed
into the wastepaper basket. “Say, why don’t you come on over tonight
and meet Ellie? She’s a great cook.”
“I’m busy,” Roy said.
“Come over at seven or you’re fired,” he said, patting Roy on the
back and leaving him alone with his work.
That night, Roy drove up to Bidden’s palatial estate alone and
rang the doorbell. He expected to be greeted by hired help, but when
his wife answered the door, Roy experienced some unexpected
empathy with his employer. What price, a few jailed hippies, if it
meant winning this.
And as the night wore on and they chatted and sipped expensive
liquor, he found that she was terrifically smart, too. At the time she
met Morris, she had been studying to be an anthropologist. She was
full of interesting ideas and knowledgeable about a wide range of
theories and postulations. Plus, she had the longest legs of any
human he had ever encountered.
“What a country yours must be,” she told Roy during dinner.
“Ethiopia. The cradle of humanity. Many of my university professors
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