“Emphasis on half.”

“At least spend some time here in the archive. You should make sure you know about Heather’s family business before you get up to defend it.”

“That sounds like a really bad idea.”

“Who knows,” said Joyce. “Maybe you’ll find something we missed. Something exculpatory.”

You could see she expected a different outcome. But as smart as she was, she never thought like Donny. He wished he could still believe that gave him an advantage.

30

Donny knew a little bit about Heather’s family business, even before they hired him. Everybody did, really, everybody who had been around long enough to know how they had gotten here. But Donny had even read the book—a copy of Helen’s dad’s memoir that Lou gave him when they were still associates at B&E. He could never forget the title: Keepers of the American Flame.

If you went all the way back, it started as a lumber company in East Texas. That grew into Diboll Timber Harvesters, a diversified wood and paper products company that even managed to go international. Helen’s father, Hank, was the one who’d had the idea to rename the company Promethean Resources, when he wanted to diversify into more scientific applications. He had a good intuition for where the zeitgeist was going.

Like the Bible, the classics were good sources for people who liked their history ahistorical, or even better, with a favorable spin. The Aeneid became popular a little later, after a new translation that drew out the American ultranationalist themes you didn’t know old Virgil had been so keen on. One of Donny’s early cases had involved a company called Pallantium, named after the mythical new home of the Trojans created when Aeneas planted the flag on Italian soil. Donny had made the point to one of the lawyers involved with that deal that Aeneas and his crew were refugees. The analogy was not well received.

The Spartans didn’t have an epic poem of their own creation myth. They profited from the empty vessel of enigma, one that exploited the layers of hagiography that had been built by outsiders, from the Athenians who crafted the myth of Thermopylae to the early Americans who named their towns after them. There were Spartas in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Michigan, and a Spartanburg, South Carolina. The Gonzalez battle flag popular with Texan gun nuts, the one with the picture of a cannon that dared the Mexicans to “come and take it,” was one of thousands of American adaptations of the purported battle cry of the 300. Many of which were printed into the morale patches and shoulder flesh of the paladins of American imperium. And a few decades earlier, when the general and his wonks put mercantile trading brigades under the control of military merchant commanders, the idea of Sparta became the namesake of a hundred paramilitary start-ups.