A Song Called Youth (120 page)

“How could they know?” Bibisch said. “
Nous arrivons
—” She broke off when Roseland shook his head at her. She sipped her iced coffee with no sign of enjoyment.

They’d come to the café because she had heard that this one had real coffee. Now that the war was over, shipments of prime consumer goods were coming into Paris again, but the stuff was taking forever, it seemed, to reach the public. Maybe some of the corrupt U.P. bureaucrats had to take theirs off the top first, to make a last profit on the black market.

Forty,
Torrence thought, as the soldiers slammed the rear doors of the transport truck.
They’re going to kill forty people. They know I’m here.

“They are the U.P’s Soldats Superieurs,” Bibisch whispered.

Torrence nodded dumbly. The government’s new SA-trained elite troops of Racially Pure Frenchmen. Superior Soldiers. The Unity Party’s SS. They wore armored kevlar uniforms of silver and flat black, the U.P.’s symbol sewn onto the shoulders: the Arc de Triomphe against a French flag.

“We will go now, Dan,” Bibisch said. “Come on.”

He shook his head. He couldn’t move. A spiritual inertia held him rooted to his chair. A weight in his gut he couldn’t possibly lift. He weighed about a ton and a half. About the weight of forty underfed people.

Some of the prisoners were dark-skinned, a few of them were Hassidim, several of them white French “subversives”; they milled in a small oblate crowd, blurred together, individuality lost in the commonality of their confusion at this abrupt consummation of destiny. The guards stood around them in a human chain, facing inward. A man Torrence recognized as Giessen, The Thirst, studied the crowd around the square.
Don’t move. Don’t run. Don’t scream. He’ll notice you.

“I can’t move anyway,” Torrence muttered.

Bibisch looked at him. “
Quoi?
”

Torrence said nothing.

Giessen spoke softly to the FSS commanding officer, who turned to the crowd, announced that this execution of “criminal conspirators” was being carried out in reprisal for the crimes of the terrorist “Hard-Eyes.” Then he turned to his soldiers, and barked an order. The soldiers aimed their machine pistols. Prisoners screamed, cringed. Some of the people watching screamed. The FSS officer opened his mouth with the command to fire.

Torrence stood up. Didn’t know he was doing it.

He began to move toward Giessen, opening his mouth to shout.

But Giessen wasn’t looking his way. Roseland and Bibisch took Torrence, one on each side, turned him away from the sight, Roseland covering Torrence’s mouth with a hand, Bibisch hissing something in French at their waiter—a friend.

Roseland murmured, “Role-reversal time, Torrence. My turn to keep you from blowing it.” He and three other men, shielded from the sight of The Thirst by the crowd around the square, dragged Torrence into the café. Into the back, out through a back door, up a stairs, into the building . . . down into a back street.

Torrence, voice muffled, was trying to tell them,
They must know I’m here anyway, so it doesn’t matter. They’re doing this to torture me, before they come and get me. They know. They know. This is punishment.

“No, no,” Bibisch said. “Hush.”

Torrence heard the C.O. bark his final command.

But he wasn’t there to hear the machine pistols’
sss, sss, sss
as the pellet-size explosive bullets were shot into the prisoners.

Torrence wasn’t there to hear it; he wasn’t there to see it.

But, somehow, he saw it over and over again, in his imagination, for a long time after that.

• 08 •

London.

Cooper was acting strangely. And Barrabas began to worry he’d done the wrong thing in bringing Jo Ann back here.

They were in the video editing room; not for editing, but for talking in privacy. Cooper was sitting on a swivel stool, hugging himself, swaying a little, looking as if he might fall off at any second. His eyes were dilating and shrinking, dilating and shrinking.

He’s stoned, Barrabas realized.
He’s been tinkering with his balancer.

“She’s out in the lobby?” Cooper asked thickly.

“Yes.”

“Go out and talk to her, keep her there. I’ll have Security bring her around back. We’ll have a car ready . . . ”

Someone’s footsteps sounded in the hall. Barrabas reached over, sloppily hit a switch, turned on the editor so the noise would cover their talk. It showed disconcerting images of the subhumans. Stumbling around, shitting themselves; living mockeries of humanity. Barrabas looked quickly away, trying to ignore the mewling sounds that came from the speakers.

“How much are you going to erase?” Barrabas said. “I mean—not all her recent memories? I don’t want to be erased from her memory. Unless maybe selectively. Just the gen-engineering stuff or—?”

“What are you babbling about?”

“She’s come to have that stuff erased—”

“That costs money. I mean, we can’t erase that without causing a lot of questions to be asked . . . ”

“What? I mean, what the bloody hell—”

“I’m saying, never mind any of it. Leave it to us.” Cooper tried to smile reassuringly. It was like a ferret baring its teeth.

Barrabas stared. “You’re going to kill her.”

Cooper made a dismissive gesture. “Not personally.”

Pink things, mewling, squirmed in video on the edge of his vision. “They’re going to take her in the car and—”

“You’re not really
involved
with this creature, are you? She’s a leftist, quite possibly a Communist or an Anarchist. Leave her alive and she’s liable to marry some great strapping Negro and have his children. Miscegenation of the worst order. Revolting. Put her out of your mind.”

Barrabas blanked his face, and shrugged with resignation. “Right.”

“Toddle along, now. Keep her out there till—”

“Right,” Barrabas said again. He nodded, turned, mechanically opened the door, walked stiffly out and down the hall.

He found her in the lounge. Looking nervous, turning her handbag over and over in her fingers. “Did you get the approval for the . . . thing?” she asked. As if he’d been arranging an abortion.

“Yes. Yeah, uh . . . ”

He heard voices in the next room. One of them was the chief of Security.

Barrabas took her firmly by the wrist. “Come on, I’ll take you over there myself.”

“Don’t yank me around like that.” But she went with him, out of the building. “What are you in such a fucking hurry for?”

He looked around, sorting through the traffic. It had just rained; the streets were damp and glossy, and the air was muggy as the pavement gave off the earlier heat of the day into the twilight.

There, parked in front of a pub, a hulking black taxi. The driver wasn’t at the wheel—probably having a pint.

Barrabas dragged her through traffic, making cars honk at them and swerve. He pulled her into the pub. He looked out through the dusty window, saw the SA security men stepping out of the lab’s front door. They were looking around, frowning. A beer lorrie pulled up in front of the pub, blocking their view. And traffic was thick. There might be time.

Barrabas found the cab driver at the old brass and wood bar: a squat, sallow bloke with a thin mustache and watery eyes, Southeast Asian maybe, sucking up the brown foam at the bottom of a pint. Barrabas took the width of the room in two strides, grabbed the driver’s elbow, slapped a twenty-pound note down in front of him. Britain had never changed to the world currency—was still using the pound sterling.

“Break’s over, mate. Bit of an emergency.”

“ ’Ere, I’m not giving up me dinner break for twenty quid—”

“You drinking your dinner? All right, here.” He slapped down another twenty quid. It was all the money he had.

“Barrabas, what the hell!” Jo Ann started, angrily. Thinking he was bullying a wog again. “The guy is—”

“Trust me this once, love.”

The cabbie was making a great show of his reluctance as he scooped up the forty and folded it, put it in his pocket. Then he unsteadily followed Barrabas out to his cab. Jo Ann trailed after, scowling.

The security men were on their way across the street as the lorry pulled away. They spotted Jo Ann as she and Barrabas got into the cab. The SA men shouted as the taxi pulled away, reaching into their jackets. The flow of traffic was with the cab and they quickly left the SA thugs behind.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

“Just . . . Picadilly.” Till he could think of somewhere else.

She looked at him. “We were running from them?”

He nodded, leaned back on the seat, letting the tension drain from him. Feeling dizzy. He’d hyperventilated. He whispered, “They weren’t going to erase the stuff—they were going to erase you, completely.” He made a throat cutting motion across his gullet.

She gaped at him, shook her head in disbelief. “Why?”

“Just an erase extraction—Cooper’d have to do a lot of explaining—it’d come out how he’d been skimming money from the SA. See, he—” And then he saw the way she was looking at him. Realized what he’d said.

“The SA,” she repeated. “The Second Alliance. That’s who owns that lab?” Adding in a whisper: “That’s who you work for.”

“
Did
work for. It was—I just needed work.” What was he ashamed of? He’d been proud of the uniform, the training. The mission. He ought to tell her to go to hell. But he said, “I saved your life. You know that, or not?”

She nodded slowly. “Risked yourself to do it. I know that. But you’re one of them. They don’t just hire people. What I heard, everybody’s got to
believe.
” She was staring at him, seeing him differently now. She asked him bluntly: “Do you believe in that crap? Their racist shit?”

He reached for the belief, for his pride, his conviction.

Then he saw the pink squirming things. The subhumans. The things in tank forty-one. And conviction was a wet bar of soap.

“I don’t know. It’s—getting harder to believe in.” It was the best he could manage.

She looked out the window. “Why Picadilly?”

“No reason. Just wanted to get to another part of town. Got a better idea? My house or yours is right out.”

“I ought to ditch you,” she said, not looking at him. “But I guess . . . I guess I don’t want to.”

But she continued to look out the window. He wanted to take her hand, put an arm around her, but a certain compression of her legs together, a warning in the set of her shoulders, kept him back.

After a long moment, she added, “I got an idea where we could go.”

“Some friends to hide with?”

“Yeah. Somebody, anyway, I know through a friend. Only met him once. But I think he’d help. I heard he was in town, over at Dahlia’s. A guy named Smoke.”

Barrabas had a sense of unreality when he saw Jerome-X and his enormous black Negress sitting on the sofa at Dahlia’s.

No: Jerome wasn’t on the sofa, exactly. Jerome was sitting in her lap.

Miscegeny,
Barrabas thought. Expecting to feel the nausea of revulsion. All he felt, though, was a dull disorientation.

Jerome was wearing a black leather jacket, open to show a few hairs on his skinny, shirtless chest. Antique jeans, rather silly red plastic boots with bright yellow baby doll’s arms on them in place of Mercury’s wings. The black woman wore a big shapeless red house dress with electric-blue carnations strobing on it. No shoes. Barrabas was worried the couch would break under the bloody great bulk of her.

“Hi,” Jerome said. “What’s happenin’?”

Barrabas decided it was a rhetorical question used as a greeting, and only shrugged.

Jo Ann said, “We’re looking for Dahlia.”

“Right here.” She appeared at the door to the dining room—a tall, gracefully long-necked black woman in an African robe batiked in red clay, copper, and silver; she wore silver contact lenses, white-blue lipstick, earrings that were dangly gold replicas of ancient tribal fetishes; cornrowed hair, each row glazed a different metallic color: copper, silver, gold, platinum, bronze, stainless steel . . . 

“ ’Ello, love,” she said, crossing to Jo Ann. Her anklets clinking; her bare feet slapping on the polished hardwood floor. She hugged Jo Ann, slowly and deeply. A little embarrassed, Barrabas looked around.

They were in a high-ceilinged sitting room, in the old Edwardian terrace house, beside a dusty marble fireplace. The room was busy with the sheer excess of its decor. The mantel was crowded with a collection of jade figurines. The late-nineteenth-century plaster moldings near the ceiling were ornate. On the walls, between the cheerfully painted woodwork, covering most of the faded, intricately patterned wallpaper, was a crowd of artwork; aboriginal art, with its assertive angularity, was mixed indiscriminately with the evocative blur of Impressionist paintings and the restless collaging of video paintings. African and Australian nature gods scowling out from between Seurat and Thaddeus Wong.

My God, where has she brought me to
? Barrabas thought.

Dahlia came out of the giggling clinch and snaked out a long arm to Barrabas.

In a rather rummy voice, Barrabas thought, Jo Ann said: “Oh, Dahlia, this is Patrick Barrabas.”

“ ’Lo.” He took her hand. It was warm and moist.

“I guess you’ve already met Jerome and Bettina.”

“Sort of,” he said. “And we saw them perform the other night.” Dutifully, he added, “Exxy show.”

Jerome grinned. “Thanks.”

Dahlia led Jo Ann to the Louis XIV sofa. Barrabas sat across from them in an antique chair of cracked brown leather. He tried not to stare at Jerome and Bettina.

Bloke looked like a bloody ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on the great puddle of the black woman’s lap, Barrabas thought.

Dahlia reached languidly to a remote on a mahogany end table. “Let’s have some music,” she said. Her accent was middle-class London, Barrabas thought, for all her African affectation. A wealthy family, like as not, judging from the expensive jumble of the furnishings. From a family of black immigrants, he told himself, come over a generation ago, taking opportunities that should have gone to white British natives.