A Song Called Youth (17 page)

Smoke felt an absurdly profound relief.

Steinfeld stood up. He took a chocolate bar and a vitaminpak from his pocket and put them in Smoke’s usable hand.

“They’re giving me a treatment with electric currents to heal the bones,” Smoke said to keep Steinfeld there just a little longer. “A Frenchman told me it would hurt me, but I think it’s helping. The pain is much less, It’s just a few weeks since they started doing it.”

Steinfeld nodded. “It works. We’ll come to get you when they decide the casts can come off.”

He turned to go. Smoke said quickly, desperately, “Tell me something. Anything. I need something to think about. You have plans for me. Tell me about it. Something.”

“There isn’t much I can say here.”

“Then only what you
can
say.”

Steinfeld nodded at the IV bottle. “I’ll see to it they refill that thing.”

“Tell them to take it away. I don’t need it. Tell me something, Steinfeld.”

Steinfeld took a deep breath, tugged at his beard, blew the breath out again. He looked at Smoke. “I know who you are. I found out the day before the jumpjet hit us. For a while I too thought Smoke was a nickname.”

“Wait—” Smoke felt he was going to choke.

But Steinfeld bulled grimly on. “You don’t want me to talk about it. You’ve become expert in not thinking about it, and you don’t want me to undermine that expertise. Tough. You wanted something to think about. So think about this: you’re Jack Brendan Smoke. You’re American. You were in Amsterdam when the war broke out, to see a psychiatrist at the Leydon clinic. Before that, you won the United Nations Literary Committee prize for your
Search for a Contemporary Reality.
You were the spokesman for all the people who felt lost in the accelerated rate of change. You wrote a second series of essays in which you said, generally, that there were people manipulating the Grid for political ends, and you named Worldtalk. You predicted a return of fascism and you quoted something you’d heard about the Second Circle, the secret inner circle of the Second Alliance. The ones who make the SA’s long-term goals . . . That essay was never published. Evidently someone at your publishing company was SA. Some men came to the clinic in ski masks. You were taken in the night and they—”

“Please . . . ” A great weight on his chest made it hard to breathe. “Steinfeld . . . ”

“They tortured you. They gave you a drug that made you feel that you were choking . . . ”

He stopped, seeing Smoke was gagging. He waited. After a minute the spasm passed.

Smoke lay staring at the ceiling, breathing shallowly.

“I’m going to go on, Smoke,” Steinfeld said.

Smoke just lay there.

Steinfeld said, “They wanted to know who you got the information from. About the Second Circle. You didn’t tell them. They tortured you in many ways. In many imaginative ways. And then the choking drug, again. They tried to move you to another place, where they had access to extraction. You escaped, en route, and went back to the hospital, where you broke down completely. You were sent in secret to another clinic. The men would have found the clinic anyway, eventually, would have come for you again—if not for the war. That was the day the Russian tanks crossed into Germany. And a little while later the Russians were moving in on Amsterdam, and they shelled the city. Your clinic was shelled. Almost everyone killed . . . ”

“I was in my safe, locked room,” Smoke said, taking it up in a small voice. “But then the wall was blown in. I went to get someone to put the wall back. They were all dead. Except Dr. Van Henk. I saw him—his face was bloody. The sight of him bloody like that frightened me. I don’t know why it affected me so strongly—I ran from him, we lost sight of each other in all the burning. Was it Van Henk who—?”

“Yes. I had this from Van Henk. He’s still alive. So far as I know.”

“I was the only patient not killed. Wherever I went there were only the dead. I wandered out of there. Sometimes the choking, from the drug—it would start again. It seemed to come back, maliciously, after me. The choking and the dead everywhere . . . For a long time I couldn’t remember who I was. When I could remember—I wanted to forget again. Wanted to be someone else . . . ” His voice was cracked glass.

Steinfeld said, “Sometimes your face looked familiar to me. But under all that grime . . . and the way a man gets wasted . . . ” He shrugged. “So you wanted me to tell you something. There’s this: you were a great writer. A great speaker, great humanist. The torture didn’t break you—but then again it did. Even so, Smoke: you could help us. In the States the only ones who believe that the fascists are coming again are the ones trying to help them. As for the others—” He shook his head sadly. “Worldtalk pushes their buttons. But if people keep speaking up in the underGrid . . . You
could
help us! People remember you.”

Smoke said, “I
can’t.
”

“Sometimes I see a man who’s broken, or bent by torture, and I know he’ll never change. Never heal. When I saw you with that crow,” he smiled ruefully, “I knew you would heal. That meant the other possibilities I saw in you could become real. Now you have something to think about.”

Steinfeld nodded, once, to say good-bye and went away. Leaving Smoke to just lie there, staring at the ceiling.

Hard-Eyes and Jenkins were walking through the Parc Monceau. It was the flaccid end of late afternoon; the trees stood leafless and stark as nude crones. The forest looked dead, and misty wet, all grays and blue shadows and browns leached of life. But the smell of moldering leaves was good. Hard-Eyes inhaled it in hungry breaths and the cold air bit at his sore nostrils; pins and needles danced in his cheeks.

The HK-21 assault rifle in his hands was cold as a stone crucifix and felt nearly as heavy. He was tired; he was hungry. One meal a day was not enough.

“Steinfeld promised us more to eat,” Jenkins complained.

Hard-Eyes had been thinking the same thing, but he said, “We’re lucky to get what they give us. You get a look at that refugee camp outside town?”

Jenkins grunted. “You got a point.” His hands were red from cold on the blue steel and plastic stock of his assault rifle. They’d traded in the Weatherby and the .22 for more practical weapons.

Hard-Eyes glanced over his shoulder, wondering why the instructors were hanging back so far. And then he stopped.

He couldn’t see them at all now.

“They’re fucking with us, Jenkins,” Hard-Eyes said.

Jenkins stopped and they watched the trail behind them, expecting to see their guerrilla-warfare instructors strolling around the bend, through the attenuated bristle of bluish underbrush. Nothing.

There were no bird sounds. There had been, a few minutes before.

Hard-Eyes swallowed.

“Those guys don’t like us,” Jenkins said, his voice hushed. “What’d they say about ‘robber packs’?”

“Said we hadda be careful because the noise of the gunfire might attract robber packs. Guys that live on the other side of the park, in the shack slum over there.”

“Shit!—you think they set us up?”

“Steinfeld wouldn’t risk men like that.”

“But I’m telling you
these guys don’t like us.
They’ve decided that Americans suck. They think we’re CIA or some shit. And Steinfeld ain’t around.”

“They don’t like us but they wouldn’t—” He broke off, staring through the mist. There were men coming out of the woods.

The trees to the right of the trail were not thickly dispersed. The well-spaced trunks came together in the compression of distance, becoming a corrugated wall of gray about fifty yards away. From here it looked liked a solid wall of trees. So when the men came out of that solid-seeming wall it looked as if they were squeezed out, like man-shaped drops of liquid. They looked as gray as the tree trunks, except there were smears of orange-pink for faces and pencil-thin strokes of blue-black and brown in their hands. Rifles.

Hard-Eyes counted eight and after that stopped counting. And looked for a place to run to. To his left was a broad, cracked parking lot. The French government scarcely existed now, and the skeleton of it that remained had no resources for park maintenance, so the parking lot was choked with blown branches and leaves; here and there were the rusty humps of stripped and abandoned cars. But the cars were too far away to be used for cover. He and Jenkins would be shot in the back if they ran across the parking lot.

The trail up ahead looked safer, but the instructors had told them, “When pressed, ask yourself if this is a situation when we must disperse—or regroup? The answer depends on the nature of the enemy and their position with relation to your own unit’s command.”

If Hard-Eyes ran ahead, the enemy would become a wedge between Hard-Eyes’ unit and the unit’s command, the instructors. The command would be threatened, hemmed in by the enemy and when possible he was to regroup to protect command.

So Hard-Eyes said, “Back down the trail.”

Jenkins said, “Shit, man—”

“Come on!”

The pack was close enough so that Hard-Eyes could make out the features in the orange-pink smudges. He turned and ran.

Hard-Eyes thought, This isn’t the enemy, this is a bunch of half-starved Parisians hoping we’ll be carrying something valuable or edible.

And he thought, The instructors have set us up so the robber pack becomes “the enemy.” Like this is a war game where the other side doesn’t know it’s playing a game.

And then he thought, The fucking instructors are hoping we’ll get our asses blown away. Or maybe we’ll burn down a few of these problem thugs for them.

. . . As he heard the first popping sounds, and the echoes like a sheet of aluminum shaken to simulate thunder. A piece of turf threw itself in the air near his feet. Irrationally, he leapt back, as if the bit of jumping ground itself were the threat.

Hard-Eyes ran on, Jenkins a little behind and falling farther behind. The trees danced crazily past; the sky made a jerky windshield wiper movement. He ran past a tree and it spat bark at him; a piece of yellow wood-flesh showed where the bullet had scored away bark.

He heard Jenkins returning fire behind him, a thudding rattle, probably no hope of hitting anyone, trying to suppress them.

Thirty feet ahead the trail sank into thickets of blue bushes. There was not much cover at the opening of the trail between the bushes. If the pack got directly behind them, they would simply stop and shoot down the line of the trail, and cut them down.

If they reached that first bend, cutting left into the bushes, they might make it.

But just then Jenkins stumbled and gave a strangely high-pitched cry as he went down, skidding over the iron-hard, iron-cold earth, his rifle clattering. Hard-Eyes wanted to run on, part of his mind already making up excuses.

But he stopped. Huffing and cursing, he turned, going upstream against his own impulse to
get the fuck out,
fighting the current in himself. He heard a scornful humming, and he knew that a bullet had missed his head by an inch or two. Jenkins was getting to his knees, puffing. How could they miss him? He was such a big target! Hard-Eyes bent and tried to help him up, but Jenkins shook his arm off—both of them annoyed—and said, “Just cover me,” as he reached for his rifle.

Hard-Eyes turned and opened up without aiming, the automatic rifle jumping in his hand; he felt like a fool when he saw that he’d shot six holes in the bole of a tree between him and the pack. Then he saw one of them coming at him from the right. The man paused about forty feet away and raised the rifle to his shoulder, aiming, like a man shooting at rabbits. He had a big nose, weak chin, gaunt cheeks. He wore a tagged brown cap. He fired. The bullet cut the air overhead. The man struggled to reload his rifle . . . 

Hard-Eyes swiveled the HK-21 and fired another burst from the hip. He had ludicrous mental images of himself as a boy taking turns with his big brother cutting the lawn because when you started the lawn-mower it made a noise like the assault rifle. He saw himself spraying a water hose at his brother—shooting an automatic weapon sometimes felt like shooting a high-pressure water hose at someone; when you were close enough to the enemy with no time to aim, you pointed the hose, raking back and forth, and hoped for the best. The man in the brown cap spun half around and staggered, dropped his rifle, but didn’t fall. He looked confused, then he turned and ran, holding his side. Wounded. Others were coming on through the trees, spread out. Hard-Eyes emptied the magazine at them, firing in little bursts. They dodged behind trees for cover—and then Hard-Eyes realized that Jenkins was up and running for the brush.

Hard-Eyes ran after him. Someone on his left shot at him. He felt a tightening sensation at the left side of his head: entirely psychosomatic; that was the place he imagined the bullets would hit him. Anticipating the sickening crack of a bullet impacting. Jenkins was about ten feet ahead, running with a wallowing motion, with poor coordination, looking as if he’d like to throw the encumbering rifle away.

And then the brush was sweeping past and Hard-Eyes felt a surge of relief as he turned the bend in the trail. For the moment he was out of their line of sight. Up ahead the trail stretched straight for a ways. That would be a good place to get shot in the back.

“Jenkins!” he hissed. “Hey—go find the instructors, I’m gonna be here in the brush on the left side, left side going this way, don’t shoot in it when you come back even if you hear gunfire in it ’cause that’ll be me!” He couldn’t be sure Jenkins heard, but Hard-Eyes thought he saw him bob his head in response.

Hard-Eyes angled left, then pressed close to the brush, turned to move back up, parallel to the trail. The brush here hooked in a question-mark shape, roughly, and he was moving up the stem of the question mark toward the inside of its hook. The pack was on the other side of the hook. He was breathing hard as much from fear as exertion, his breath smoking out white in front of him, and he thought, What if they see my breath steam above the brush; they’ll know my position . . . 

He heard a babble of voices in French. He pressed into the wall of brush at the hook of the question mark, biting his lip to keep from yelling when a twig stung his right eye, other tiny jags raking his cheek and neck and hands.