The blimp continued to dominate the sky through late morning. It moved in circles, its progress so slow, so lethargic as to be imperceptible. Every new fair attendee took in the sights of the food and rides and then the blimp, at which they pointed and smiled.

"What's it say?"

"Olongapo, it says," they said.

"Who's that?"

"He's our state representative."

"Our state representative is a blimp?"

"I don't think so. I think he's a human-type person."

"So what's he doing on a blimp?"

"He's wanting us to vote for him again."

"For what?"

"For state representative."

"So he's our congressman?"

"No, I think this is different."

"He's a senator?"

"No, I think this is just a state office. A representative ... in the state."

"A what? Like the governor?"

"No, like he represents us in Sacramento. Like the governor, but under the governor."

"Oh look, they have one of those games where you hook the rings around the frogs."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The fair did in fact have a game where participants could hook rings around the heads of frogs. The frogs looked more like cats with frog heads -- their necks were too long, their perches too feline -- though the people at that booth squealed and laughed and played again. The fair was in full swing, crowded with residents in bright clean clothing, walking slowly, wondering where to spend the $22 they'd decided to blow at the fair. There were bumper cars, and a parachute kind of ride, and the swings attached to the carousel that fly high in the air and which one sometimes see on album covers and public policy books.

On the ground, the balloon war was at full pitch, though neither side had pulled noticeably ahead. There were approximately 4,000 balloons in circulation and the number was rapidly rising. Nicky was now in the announcer's box, and was counting. There were about 2,200 Olongapo balloons to 1,800 of Craspedacusta's, with the two types forming a Yin-Yang or Pangea sort of shape in the fairground's center. Nicky ordered Dmitri to free more of the Olongapo balloons, which Dmitri did with great joy, sending another 40 or so into the air, where they flew a quarter mile, resting in the branches of a giant ficus, where they popped, convincing a member of the Mission Beach Ever-Ready Militia that the Day of Reckoning had come, and he was now staging an armed confrontation with area SWAT officers. But no one at the fair was aware of this.

At 4 p.m. a small army of 13-year-olds, the scourge of any mass of decorative balloons, descended. They seemed to come from all sides at once, 50 of them. They all looked the same, with their long shorts and their visors on upside down, their dirt bikes and their squinting eyes. Before long the popping began, like the sound of snare drums being struck in every corner of the fair.

Why must these kids destroy everything they see? Sergei wondered. Birds, icicles, streetlamps, Trans Ams -- anything exquisite and smashable. At Sergei's command, Jeannie Two got rid of them all in the usual way: She handed out a box of Lubriderm and copies of Juggs. They gathered around her, already half-blind and sweating from every orifice, and there was a quick sucking sound, a great implosion of time and space, as the boys flew off to the nearest carpeted basement to test-drive the bounty.

By 11, the day was in full swing. The fairgrounds were bursting and the children's parade, which had featured an abridged theatrical version of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was over, and the people kept streaming in. Stuart was in the thick of it, his bomber's jacket draped over one shoulder, his back soaked with sweat just under it, always preceded or trailed by one of the Jeannies. He was shaking hands, rustling the hair of young boys, saying hello to teenage girls without looking at any part of them, including their eyes. Sergei had told him that the trick was to stare at the tops of their eyebrows, thus seeming to be making eye contact without any possibility of implying anything lewd, for teenage girls, Sergei insisted, saw lewdness and sex and propositions and worse in the eyes of any man over 22. Stuart was running low on Wet Wipes.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

It was around noon when Ronette Robinson, Olongapo's right hand, sailed over to Sergei. She was always so smug. She looked like a news anchor, polished and with just enough sass to be sexy, always wearing something silk; she'd worked for Dukakis and thought that meant something. She'd advised Gephardt and thought that meant something. She'd gone to the Kennedy School and fellowed at Brookings, had been published in Dissent and thought that meant something. She was insufferable, acting always as if Sergei was taking all this too seriously, this race. She'd been called down from Sacramento, actually, when Sergei had been brought over from Minnesota, so there was a symbiosis here, something of a shared vision of the future, even if a wildly divergent future, and Sergei naturally wondered if he should have a romance with this woman.

"That's a pretty old-looking blimp," Sergei said.

"It should look old," she said. "It's an antique. One of our volunteers is a collector of old airships." Sergei and Ronette both looked up at the blimp.

"He fill it with hydrogen, too?" Sergei laughed.

"Matter of fact, he did."

"Good, good. Glad there's a mass of highly flammable gas floating over the fairgrounds."

Ronette patted his hand maternally. She did this often.

"Don't be so sad, my emigré friend," she said. "You're in America now. Ease up."

She wanted to make clear that she felt for Sergei, thought he was desperate and not equipped with all the tools for his job. She did this in part because she was attracted to Sergei -- was it his turtlenecks? His snug black jeans and woven belt? -- and she felt he was a good enough man in the wrong line of work. If she married him she'd let him stay home, tinker in the basement with model airplanes. Her condescension made him want to win this one more than any race since Montenegro, when he'd run against an ex-Monk named Roberto, who wore fur collars and stole Sergei's girlfriend and then dropped her a month later. He missed her, he had to admit. She had eyes like a squirrel monkey's, but he missed her.

"Listen, I am sorry about your man Bennett," she said, though they'd never spoken about this subject before. She was a hellion he loved very much. Sergei feigned disinterest.

"You haven't heard?" she pressed.

"Right, right," Sergei said, "he plays cards." Sergei tried to whistle in a dismissive way, but it came out sounding like he was choking.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine."

Sergei was fine, was at ease, knowing that without a picture of his man with William Bennett, the association would never stick. He was about to tell Ronette about his lack of concern when she pulled out of her valise (only she would have a valise at the Fourth of July fairgrounds) a piece of paper, a color copy, which featured a smiling Stuart Craspedacusta -- he was beaming! -- doing the golf-tournament handshake with Bill Bennett. God knows where and when it was taken. "It was from a golf tournament, the Bob Eubanks Invitational. You haven't seen this?"

Sergei grimaced. A dragonfly sped between the two of them and Sergei remembered, with excruciating clarity, a day of his childhood, chasing salamanders and dragonflies in a riverside cemetery on a Ukraine vacation. Was that possible? When was that? Who was the boy with him that day? Oh how he missed his mother, her strong shoulders and deep voice!

"1999. Look at Stuart -- he's so cute!" Ronette really was a cancer.

"Your point?" Sergei pleaded. "You're boring me, and I'm hard to bore."

"Oh gosh. You don't know ... " She sighed and crossed her arms. "Now I'm even sorrier I have to bring you this news," she clucked, and told Sergei that tomorrow's paper would carry news that Bennett had wagered not just on card games and horses, but on the last five presidential elections. "He bet against both Bushes," Ronette added.

Sergei experienced a stabbing sort of pain in his knees.

"He lost about $500,000," Ronette added, "about what he dropped that one night in the Bellagio."

Sergei's knees always hurt when he got bad news. He leaned on the booth, attempting to look casual.

"What I don't understand," Ronette continued, "is how a guy like Bennett had that kind of cash to throw around. Did 'The Book of Virtues' pull down that kind of money?" He was going to kill Nicky. It was Nicky's job to see these things coming. Ronette was blooming with power. She would make a great queen. If Sergei ever became a king, of anything, he would make her his queen. Lord she had presence! Even if she was a wretched blight upon mankind. She smiled like a pediatric nurse.

"I'm surprised Little Nicky didn't tell you about this. What happened -- his Blackberry run out of batteries? He didn't show you this, I don't suppose -- it's a little ad our art department put together." She pulled another color copy from her valise, this one with above the smiling handshakers these words: CRASPEDACUSTA -- Don't Bet On It.

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