A Song Called Youth (25 page)

“Man, you took out of place here,” Charlie said.

The man in the gray suit chuckled.

The basement was empty on one end, the other dominated by a pile of detritus, accumulated junk from the old tenement above, including a lot of torn up carpeting gone mildewy gray, looking like The Thing That Lived in the Cellar.

“I’m Purchase,” the man in the gold choker said.

He extended his hand and they shook all around. But no one else gave a name. Purchase’s hand was warm and moist.

Charlie shrugged. “This must be the guy.”

Purchase looked at his watch. “You were expecting a guy who looked like John Reed, maybe?”

Kessler looked at Charlie. “Isn’t there a password or code phrase or something?”

Purchase answered for him. “The meeting place is the password. Who else would be down here?”

Kessler stared at Purchase. “I don’t like anything ambiguous. You say Worldtalk, you say SA, you say Steinfeld. I mean, for all I know, I’m not really seeing you. Maybe they came in last night, maybe they treated me and Charlie and Julie so we share the same hallucination. Maybe they’re trying to propagandize—that revolutionaries are really a lot of fat cats. Like the IRA and PLO chiefs who used to make fortunes off the black market. Maybe you’re not here and I’m talking to an empty chair.”

Purchase nodded. “That’s not
impossible,
but it’s pretty unlikely. You stood watches, last night, I presume. Anyway—I’m not a revolutionary. Never said I was. I’m an employee. I work for Steinfeld, while pretending to work for the SA, while pretending to work for Worldtalk. SA thinks I’m their man in Worldtalk; but I’m Steinfeld’s man in the SA. Only, I’m not a radical. Not unless it’s radical to want the United States to stay the United States. I’m a patriot—and I’m a mole, planted in Worldtalk. And I’m placed to keep an eye on the people who want to make the United States the Fascist States of America. Is that explicitly enough? Two days ago I got the Worldtalk memo about Mr. Kessler’s program. I happen to know that Steinfeld is working up something similar. He wants you with us. By
God
this is stupid. It’s cold in this dump. Do we have to go into this here? There’s a van upstairs, big and comfortable, right across the street. We’ll talk on the way.”

Kessler hesitated. Maybe he should still go to the ACLU.

But Charlie and Julie had insisted they had to go into hiding. “This Steinfeld will help me get my work back? My life?”

“He’ll help you. If you help him.”

Kessler took a deep breath, and nodded.

They went upstairs.

Part Three:
SWENSON

• 11 •

Ellen Mae Crandall stood at the head of the table, in Conference Room B, seventieth floor of the Worldtalk Building. It was an oblong table in an oblong room, a room with the usual imitation-wood-paneled walls and thick umber rug. There was just a trace of the shabbiness—a smutching of the transparent table, a fade in the color of walls and carpet—that such new places acquire after a remarkably short usage.

Sitting to her right, watching her without staring at her, John Swenson was thinking that Ellen Mae Crandall resembled her brother to an unfortunate degree. What were pleasingly masculine features on her brother were coarse on Ellen Mae. She had the heavy eyebrows; the deep, intense brown-black eyes; the wide, flashing grin showing a piano-keyboard spread of teeth, perfect and spotless, all the black keys missing . . . 

Swenson smiled at the thought. There were no black keys in the Second Alliance. But some of the piano’s hammers were black. They used whoever they had to use.

Ellen Mae wore a black shirt-suit with a lacy white collar. She looked pale, and her eyes were sunken even deeper than usual.

Swenson, conscious of his youth and good looks and trying to de-emphasize them—the last thing he needed to contend with was envy-seeded suspicion—sat across from Colonel Watson.

The Colonel was one of those ageless outdoorsmen who might be as young as forty-five and as old as seventy—he was closer to the latter. His florid face, weathered by the tropical sun during a hundred campaigns to suppress black independence, was British resolute, and British classic. His smoky-blue eyes flickered up and down the table, filing reactions, attitudes, levels of competence. Swenson considered him the number two power in the SA.

Sitting beside Watson was corpulent, nervous Sackville-West, head of Internal Security, breathing noisily through his mouth, scribbling notes which he screened with one cupped, doughy hand, like a priggish schoolboy who suspected his neighbor of cheating on exams.

The rest of the table was taken up by Spengle, Gluckman, and Katzikis and their secretaries—since the transcribing computer built into the table provided copies of all that was said, none of the secretaries were needed; they were there for reasons of pomp and Swenson ignored them. His mind was on Ellen Mae.

But Swenson was going to move carefully, softly, delicately. He had been investigated once, after the attempted assassination, and he had weathered it, had in fact come out of it in a position of strength. But two investigations would be one too many.

And Sackville-West trusted no one except for Crandall.

Ellen Mae called the meeting to order. She smiled and said, “The first order of business is to tell you that Rick is off the critical list, and his condition is now listed as serious. But Dr. Wellington informs me that Rick is pulling through with flying colors and is expected to be on his feet in two weeks—”

There was the expected murmur of relieved pleasantries around the table, Swenson carefully adding his own sigh of happiness.

“Now normally—” Just a touch of mischief in her voice, a mama with a Christmas surprise. “—I’d lead the opening prayer myself. But today, Rick is going to do it.”

Heads snapped up. A few of the lower-echelon people muttered concern. Swenson waited, expressionless, guessing what was up.

Ellen Mae tapped out a brief order on the keyboard built into the table in front of her. A wafer-thin video screen hummed down from a slot in the ceiling behind her. She stood to one side. The room darkened; the screen lit up.

Rick Crandall faded in, in slightly drained colors; the picture was a little fuzzy around the edges. Crandall looked pale, but better than Swenson had expected. Makeup? Probably. Crandall was propped up a little in a hospital bed. An IV tube led from a wall panel to his arm.

Crandall smiled.

There was a stirring around the room in response. That smile was short of a grin, but it was strong, and certain, and it sent a thrill of reassurance through every one of them.

“G’mornin, friends,” Crandall said in his soft Southern accent—so soft it was almost missing. “I want to thank you all for standing by me in this time, and for holdin’ the fort for me. I have a report here . . . ” He gestured toward something off-camera. “ . . . that informs me you have been faithfully manning the watchtowers. I’m feeling a whole heckuva lot better and looking forward to being back at Our Work in two or three weeks—that is, unless the doctor’s maybe a Democrat or a Jew! And I guess if he’s one, he’s the other.”

A ripple of laughter around the room. That Rick.

“Now if I could . . . ”

Swenson said it in his mind along with Crandall, he’d heard it so often,
Now if I could just have your attention for the most important business in the world, we’ll say a prayer.

“ . . . business in the world,” Crandall was saying, “we’ll say a prayer.”

He closed his eyes and tilted his head down a little. Everyone in the conference room did the same thing.

“ . . . Lord, we beseech you to let us learn from our mistakes; to care for one another so deeply we will not allow our brethren to stray for a moment from Our Work, which is
Your
Work; to give us the strength to persevere in this moment of vulnerability; to know the Devil when he stands among us. Lord, you sent the Devil among us, to teach us a strong lesson. You struck the stigmata of the Christian Warrior into me, to humble me and to illuminate the gravity of Our Work; Lord, we beseech you . . . ”

The prayer came rhythmically, in something near a monotone, but it never droned. It conveyed urgency, but it was never hysterical.

Crandall was wounded, and sick, and this was probably taking a lot out of him, but you had to hand it to the guy, Swenson thought, he had the art down and he could lay it out from a hospital bed and still make you shiver way down in your bones.

He explained things in the prayer, simply and with finality: the would-be assassin had been the Devil’s man, just that simple. In order to prevent such a thing from happening again, to prevent another diabolic incursion, we must search ourselves, and those around us: we must increase security and we must watch one another like hawks, in God’s name. There are traitors afoot.

And Crandall had rung in stigmata. Without saying it directly—that would be sacrilegious—he had managed to imply that in being shot he was martyred, that in some sense he was a stand-in for Christ Himself.

And they would buy it, Swenson knew. The word
stigmata
would start a train of associations in their minds, as Crandall knew it would, and sooner or later they would proclaim him Messiah.

And Swenson thought,
Oh shit, Devereaux.

Devereaux’s mission was totally misbegotten.
I told them, use a bomb. The mission had to be a suicide. I told them a bomb.

But then, a bomb hadn’t worked when they’d tried to kill Hitler.

As the prayer ended and the lights came up, Swenson caught Sackville-West looking hard at him. The old man seemed an incompetent dodderer and more than once Swenson had wondered if he deliberately played that up to make his enemies underestimate him. And just now he was watching Swenson.

Making Swenson think:
I let myself slip out of character.

And you can’t even do that in your thoughts. Steinfeld had warned him.
You’re an idealist, John, and you’re too well motivated for deep penetration; they’ll sense you, they’ll smell you out, because you can’t bury it deep enough.

But Swenson had been the one, because Ellen Mae wanted him close to her, so there was nothing else for it.

Swenson forced himself into the role. He put a hand to his eyes and thought about Crandall and saw him as his Uncle Harry, whom he’d loved; Uncle Harry, who’d died of cancer; the method acting pushed his buttons, and the tears came. Reverential tears.

He cut it off quickly. Don’t overdo it.

Ellen Mae smiled down at him. She stood close beside him, her bony hip pressed against his arm; she reached down and squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. Her own eyes glistened with tears.

“He’ll be back. He’ll be back soon,” she said softly.

“I know,” Swenson said, smiling bravely.

In one of the notebooks in which Rickenharp wrote ideas and lyrics, the last thing he’d written was:
Synchronicity laughs when we see it and laughs when we don’t.

At the precise instant Swenson was replying to Ellen, a long way away, Rickenharp was saying, “Yeah, I know.” Because Carmen had just said, “What did you expect? It’s not easy and it’s not fun and it’s not romantic.”

“I
mean,
” she went on, “did you expect there would be a kind of TV fadeout on our shaking hands, agreeing to take you with us, and then maybe a quick cut to the action, some street fight in which you blow away the enemy, and then cut to the scene where you get your medals?”

“
No,
I didn’t fucking expect that,” Rickenharp growled. “But this is fucking ridiculous. I didn’t know heaps like this still existed anywhere.”

Yukio shrugged. “It’s a typical Maltese fishing trawler.”

Yukio, Willow, Rickenharp, and Carmen were huddled miserably in the hold of a fishing boat. A lantern swung pendulously with the wallowing of the creaking boat. An engine rattled and coughed somewhere behind them. The hold stank of rotting fish blood, and Rickenharp kept waiting to get used to it and he never did. Every breath was a fight with gagging. He was cold. The hold was clammy. The inner bulkhead behind drank heat from him. But if he sat anywhere else, or in the middle, he got seasick. He’d already thrown up twice, in the far corner, and he didn’t want the dry heaves. The swinging lantern made him sick, but he didn’t want the darkness either.

He’d sat hunched like this for hours. Somewhere between five and twelve hours—probably closer to five—and it seemed like days. He coughed, and he felt faintly feverish.

I’m getting a fucking cold, he thought.

But he’d complained once, and he wasn’t going to let himself complain anymore, because Carmen’s tone told him she was one step from contempt for him.

And the worst of it, the deep muddy trench of it was,
the drugs were gone.

Here he was, slogging along in a boat Frankie’s source used for smuggling drugs, among other things, but the hold was empty now, and they’d gone through Carmen’s supply and Rickenharp’s three grams—one gram ruined by a slopover wave when they’d boarded from the rowboat . . . They’d done them all, and now he felt burnt and enervated, and he was on a tightrope over the pits of the various pits of his personal hells, pits he knew like a man six months in solitary knows his tiny cell.

How much longer?
he wanted to ask.

Is it much farther to Denver, Mom?

Your father’s fed up with hearing that. You kids play with your holo-boy or something . . . 

The fever rose, and warmed him, and he slipped into a pleasant delirium; driving with his parents across the country, he could almost feel the vinyl of the car’s seats against his cheek . . . 

We’ll never get there,
the little boy whined, in the delirium.

“We’ll get there.” Carmen’s voice, from somewhere. “Or we’ll drown and it won’t matter.”

“Nationalism is the key to any nation.” Watson was saying. He smiled urbanely. “Seems obvious, doesn’t it? The very impulse that normally serves to exclude foreign control can insure the
success
of foreign control—if the key is turned from within the target country.”