A Song Called Youth (114 page)

Briand looked at them with a gentle amazement as they came in. Smoking a cigarette, Old Briand sat in an old wooden kitchen chair; his face was gray with grief and age and flecked with salt-and-pepper stubble; he wore the uniform of a street cleaner, his crumpled hat in his hands, a china bowl of coffee and a bit of bread on a white wooden table beside him.

Bibisch and Torrence were dressed as construction workers themselves, as if they’d been laboring with rabble-reclamation teams all day. They’d put dust in their hair and grimed their hands. Their machine pistols were well hidden in their clothing.

Father Lespere wore a cassock, as if he were about to take confession, and in a way he was.

They shook hands and drank a little coffee and complained of the drizzle outside. Through the window, through the attenuated slant of rain, Torrence saw the strange landscape of Parisian rooftops, looking to him, in his present mood, like the monuments of a cemetery, the humped gray tile roofs and attic stories like barrows and mausoleums, the chimneys like an endless vista of abstracted gravestones. Here and there were the blasphemous intrusion of dormer windows. The surfaces slick with water; the sky murky with it.

“
Et bien,
” Lespere said, “if you are ready to hear the story, I will ask Briand to tell it.”

Torrence nodded mechanically.

Working hard to keep his expression neutral, Torrence listened as Bibisch translated the old Frenchman’s account. “They came in the morning, when everyone is a-sleeping. Not me, I work very early, I am alone awake in the building, happy that morning because I have some tea,
difficile
to get . . . Then there is a sound of a truck and a machine that smashes doors and the building shake, everything fall from the wall; and the men come into every apartment, take us out by the necks, we cannot see the faces because they have balls of glass on them. You know this kind of soldier . . . they take us to the street, everyone is looking from the other buildings. And they murder. That is all. They murder. They broke in—many times I have seen them break in and take people, and say that it is for France, it is for the Unity Party, it is for Security, and they had weapons so we will not argue—but this time they did not take someone to a prison, no. They kill them. They kill them there on the street. They say is reprisal. Is execution for . . . ” She hesitated, then asked Briand to repeat the name. Briand did; said it quite clearly. Torrence felt a ghostly hand trying to choke off his breath.

Reprisal. For the one called
Hard-Eyes.
For the work of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.

Aka Daniel Torrence.

“How many are dead?” Torrence asked in a croak.

“
Quatre,
” the old man said. “
Une petite fille.
” One of them a little girl.

Torrence let out a long, slow, shuddery breath.

“They do it with a child, too.
C’est psychologie.
” Bibisch told Torrence softly, squeezing his arm.

He nodded. “They’re trying to play on everyone’s feelings. Including mine. And it’s going to work.”

She shook her head. “
Non! Merde, c’est pas vrai!
” And then launched into a burst of rapid-fire French. Telling him off for letting this get to him, he gathered. The sound of her voice was loud in the room, but to Torrence it was a distant echo, the sound of a passing siren heard in the distance as you stand in a funeral chapel.

He envisioned strapping explosives about himself, breaking into SA HQ, blowing up The Thirst and Watson and as many others as possible . . . just taking them with him.

“Why did they pick your building, Monsieur Briand?” Torrence asked.

Lespere did the translation this time, as the old man wearily said, “Maybe no reason, or perhaps because someone in the building complained about the water. We had no water for two weeks, and the Unity government controls the utilities, and they said it was unpatriotic to complain because everyone must face shortages. Or perhaps for no reason, just a neighborhood where none of their own class live. I do not know,
Monsieur.
”

Lespere turned to Torrence. “They probably picked one that had annoyed them, but it wasn’t of great consequence. Their object was to attack you, Torrence.”

The old man was crying now, with no change in his expression. He simply let the tears roll as he spoke. “Simone,” Bibisch translated for him, “was my niece. The little girl. I have no one now.” She added, in an aside, “Say he wants to die . . . ” She shrugged.

“Then he came to the right place,” Torrence muttered.

“You are feeling sorry for yourself?” Lespere asked him.

Torrence shook his head. Then, abruptly, he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I am. For me and everybody else that got stuck in this fucking thing.”

“You leave the work of Christ to Christ. Sacrifice is required of you, but not martyrdom. It is just beginning. You have to be ready. It will be worse. The Thirst will bring people in and torture them to try to find you. But the truth is very simple: You are doing more good than harm, even if they take reprisals in your name, Daniel.”

Bibisch nodded. “
Exactement. C’est
ç
a.
”

Torrence felt like an urn filled with ashes.
Une petite fille . . . Torture them to try to find you . . . 

“More good than harm?” he snorted. “That’s hard to believe.”

“There is one thing I am especially equipped to know,” Lespere said. “And that is: believing is always hard.”

The Glass Key Club, London.

Barrabas and Jo Ann. It was the third club they’d gone to on their first date. The Glass Key was an after-hours place, rounding out things nicely because both of them were jacked up on MDE spritzers and couldn’t have slept anyway. And the Glass Key was the kind of place you went when you felt that way and you were looking for a place to be in public and yet be alone . . . 

They’d gone into the ambient-field of the sex club’s back rooms by tacit mutual agreement, acting as if they were just looking around, checking the place out, but both of them knowing how it’d end up here, especially with the sexual momentum that’d been building up all night, and the drug-drinks.

The first time, they did it standing up; he pinned her to the wall, her skirt hiked up and her legs wrapped around his hips. The second time, on the mattress that covered the floor, and they’d even undressed, except he’d forgotten and left his socks on; she mercilessly teased him for that later.

The third time was very slow, and he never did quite come, but that was all right.

Afterward, though, the MDE was beginning to wear off, they were both tired and sore and, one of the after-effects of the drug, a little irritable. “I could just burn out the fucking Brain Bank excess with druggy brain damage,” she said, “if I keep this up.”

“Oi’d die for a pint o’ bitters,” Barrabas muttered. His birthright accent showing through his fatigue.

“Yeah, I could use a drink without any goddamn uppers in it,” she said, awkwardly pulling on her panty hose. They dressed in silence after that, went out to the bar, and—it was closed.

“Shit!” they both said at once.

Outdoors, the morning sun had the cruel temerity to be breaking through the clouds, and Barrabas felt his head throb with the intrusion of light and street noise.

But the fresh air helped a little, and the walking flushed out their systems some, and after a few minutes of strolling to the tube station, looking wistfully at the black-snail humps of the electric taxis they could no longer afford, they held hands and felt a little closer once more.

They paused in front of some shop windows, where cameras took in their image, digitalized it, and projected it onto the blank-faced robot mannequins in the window—so that in the window display he was now wearing baggy pants and a coat-and-tails made of black leather, and a ruffled puce shirt, and she was wearing a skintight spiral-strip gown. Their exact faces appeared on the mannequins, which mimicked even their movements, like reflections in mirrors. They laughed when they saw it. “That’s supposed to make me want to buy it?” Barrabas said. “Seeing myself in that I’ll never go near one of them rigs.” He gave it the finger—and the mannequin of himself in the black leather coat-and-tails and ruffled shirt dutifully gave him the finger back, his own exact face grinning back at him.

She laughed, and then held her head. “Ow. Don’t make me laugh.” They walked on.

“That was some exxy night,” Barrabas said when they reached the image-crowded hoardings around the tube station.

They stopped, and she grinned at him. Some of the almost luminous vitality that had attracted him to her flared in her eyes again. “Yeah.”

Four young Pakistani men, probably students on their way to university, burst from the tube station and shoved hurriedly past Barrabas and Jo Ann, one of them bumping into her. Barrabas scowled. The Paki who’d jostled her paused beside Barrabas to look her over. She was rumpled and mussed from the events at the sex club.

He grinned. “Sorry, miss. Wish I had time to apologize right. Looks like you’re a bit o’ fun.”

Barrabas reacted instinctively. His hand snaked out, smacked the wog backhanded so that he staggered into his friends. In his most upper-crust voice, Barrabas snapped out, “You disgusting little wog. How dare you.” Feeling a surge of pleasure as he said it. Thinking he was making points with Jo Ann, showing her he’d fight for her, keep the rabble off her. “Get the bloody hell out of here, you wanking wog bastard,” he said. “Back to Packi-land, preferably.”

The wog went all flint-eyed and started to sputter an answer, but the students laughed derisively at Barrabas to defuse the thing, and made obscene gestures, then dragged their angry friend away. Chiding him to ignore the Fascist oaf: “Probably an SA git.”

Barrabas realized that Jo Ann was staring at him. The red of fatigue in her eyes could have been tailored for the cold anger in her expression. “I don’t believe it,” she said with slow and careful incredulity. “You had me fooled into thinking you were a human being. But you’re a fucking Nazi. Aren’t you?”

“What? Nazi? Bloody hell. No. No.”

“You’re a racist thug!”

“I just . . . I just want them out of England, the wogs. There isn’t room. There isn’t enough work or food, and we have our own effing way of doing things here.”

“You really believe that shit? You ever think for yourself?”

“I always think for meself. What a load of bollocks—what do you know about it, you’re a bloody American!”

“Yeah. Fine. Fuck off.”

She turned on her heel and ran into the tube.

He wanted to go after her and couldn’t.

There was a monstrous roaring in his head. But it was only a train, roaring by on the elevated tracks. Stopping on the platform, up the staircase from him. His train. After a moment, he dragged himself to it.

Paris, France.

The Jægernaut crunched down the street, making the buildings shake, so that loose bricks and bits of cornices rained onto the sidewalks and Watson was glad he sat in the armored protection of a bus-sized Internal Security Vehicle. They had driven in only a minute ahead of the Jægernaut, and now they watched its approach on the monitors inside the ISV—cameras were safer than windows—and it felt something like watching a missile test in a military ICBM-launch installation: The monitoring equipment bleeping to itself, the impassive technicians wearing their headsets as they helped direct the Jægernaut and scanned for saboteurs. It was distanced just enough by the screens—watching it from the street nearby, exposed, was a little too awe-inspiring. Too unnerving. It was like watching a volcano erupt—or watching as some contorted, massive-girdered suspension bridge pulled itself up from its moorings and went for a vindictive walk . . . 

The Jægernaut—this model remote-controlled—came on with the methodical pacing of automation, not gracefully but without hesitation, making directly for the old tenement building. Watson was glad they’d got the address right. It was a bit dismaying when they crushed the wrong house, since they usually killed several hundred of the wrong people. And that was perfectly awful public relations.

Some of the tenement’s residents had felt the Jægernaut coming, and a few had made it out the door. But most of them hadn’t had time.

Others came to the windows to look for escape. But then the hammer came down. The Jægernaut’s smashing scythe of impervious girders, aided by a tight microwave beam to soften the building’s stone, bit deeply into the roof of the tenement, crunching through tile and roof like a beak crushing the shell of a snail.

And the building’s people were like the slugs that squirmed in snail shells, Watson thought. They stood in the windows, screaming and waving their arms as if that’d stop thousands of tons of crystallized alloy bearing down on them.

Bloody stupid of them, really. If you know you’re going to die, Watson reasoned, die with a little dignity. What was the use of hysteria?

The Jægernaut bit more deeply into the building; Watson could feel the vibration of its impact as it shivered through the street, quivering through the ISV. In less than a minute, an eight-story building was imploded, a crushed shell, a spindly, collapsing thing in a hood of smoke and dust. The screaming was now drowned out in the steel-foundry roar of the Jægernaut’s grinding progress. When the scythe rotated up, like the blade of a Rototiller coming around again, it was edged in dripping red.

Watson would have enjoyed this more under normal circumstances. But Giessen—The Thirst—was here, looking as usual for all his dramatic
nom de guerre,
like a prissy Royal Tax Accountant, and the bastard was spoiling Watson’s fun.

They were sitting side-by-side in the cramped control deck, just behind the driver and to one side of the forward gunner, whose head was entirely concealed by the complex machinery of his video targeting ordnance. Watson sipped tea from a plastic cup; The Thirst drank coffee with a little schnapps in it. He was listening on a headset to the rooftop surveillance crew and the chopper.