Of course Olioke knew him. Gregory Tampico and Solomon Olioke (you flat-out, hands-down, like, seriously fucking hate Olioke), they shared Namibia, and Olioke attended many Happiness Foundation fundraisers, and how many times across ballrooms, across tables all adorned with English bone china, across glittering chandeliers and candles as lukewarm chicken piccata and some kind of scampi were served, how many times did you see Olioke standing there in the corner, expressionless as a coatrack?

You have no friends. You are hemorrhaging alliances. Greg Tampico is dead. Your mother doesn’t like you. Toby Castle doesn’t like you. Even Olioke, a fellow Republican, has thrown you under the bus for Nancy Fucking Beavers’s fucking stooge Rutledge, but the reason why is inexplicable until you remember: the aardvark. Olioke knew Tampico had it.

After Tampico gave notice, quit directing the foundation, Olioke must have wanted to return it, you think, to his people, and really, he, like, could have just taken the aardvark and made off with it somehow, leaving you out of it, but no—Nancy Beavers would be “super grateful,” Rutledge told Olioke, and when the time came, as everyone knew it eventually would, she “would not forget about the good people of Rhode Island”—and as you make for the exit of Murphy & Milliken’s, absorbing how it played out, the irony of your reelection campaign missive “Divide to unite” is so not lost on you. It becomes clear how, together, Republican and Democrat united, Rutledge and Olioke spied on you and Greg Tampico.

How they must have sat in a dark car outside Tampico’s walk-up. How, after you fled Greg Tampico’s the last time you saw him, it must have been Rutledge and Olioke who followed the medics who came spilling out of the ambulance when Tampico’s landlady found him. How the two of them must have stood over the zebra-pelt bedspread after the body was removed, discussing what to do until Rutledge, he said he had an idea: Olioke could contact your staffers about Greg Tampico’s death and Rutledge could borrow a FedEx uniform, a FedEx truck and a clipboard, all for fifty dollars in cash, from a pair of heroin addicts working this remote FedEx place he knew. And Olioke nicked one piece of Tampico’s gilded letterhead from the messy stack which he always kept on the imitation Louis XIV French dresser, next to the aardvark, assembled both the blank note and the aardvark into a large brown packing box, loaded her up onto the FedEx truck, and then Rutledge, wearing fake eyeglasses, some crazy fake beard, a FedEx uniform, trusting that you never look long or hard at anything except mirrors, delivered her right to you at the front door of 2486 Asher Place yesterday morning—

You have no proof. But all of this you know in your bones to be true, and six weeks from now, when you are seated in front of the congressional committee for your various crimes, it is why you will look right into Representative Rutledge’s eyes and apologize. Say that you have no memory of the FedEx man who delivered the aardvark other than what small details you share. No memory at all.