A Song Called Youth (70 page)

New York City.

“What you say, Charlie boy?” Angelo tapped the table with his credit card, meaning he’d pay.

“No, it fucks me up. The next day I always feel like shit.” They talked loud, and in Standard, to hear each other over the music.

“Come on, you’re not gonna get hung up on it, you’re not where you can get at it most of the time. Come on, I don’t like to do Room alone. And this is the best fucking Room in New York, absolutely bar none, no shit.”

“You’re a big help, Angelo. You know that?”

Charlie and Angelo were in a dark place that was splintered with light. On the private club’s stage, four nearly naked blacks and two Puerto Rican girls, all of them direct-wired to the muscle synthesizers, shimmied out a black sound that was something like sexy bagpipes and electric alto sax over salsa percussion; and the light came from behind the band, lasers and colored spots backlighting them, ricocheting from their sweat-shiny skin to dazzle the black ceiling, but lost in the deep dourness of the smoky club. Black walls, black floor. Sitting at a black table beside the black wall; one side of Angelo’s face in darkness, laser jitters making an expressionist painting of the other side.

Charlie and Angelo were playing a game that was like sexual coyness. It was drug coyness. Charlie wanted to score some Room, but he was scared to get started doing that again, knew it wasn’t responsible to the NR. So he needed to be able to tell himself that Angelo had talked him into it.

And Angelo sensed that. Angelo knew that the best way to get Charlie to do Room was to play to his guilt, cultivate his depression, hold something over him he’d need to get out from under. Saying, “Hey, it wasn’t like it was your fault. It was Spector’s. No one responsible but him. ”

But just mentioning it was telling him the opposite. Because Charlie felt funny about his part in setting up Spector. You watch a guy for days, you get a little sympathy for him, whether he deserves it or not. And he’d done more than watch Spector, he’d filmed him from behind the two-way in the panel truck when he moved around in public. They’d checked out the stock video of Spector talking to the public—but that wasn’t close enough, sharp enough for an animation-matrix.

The stuff Charlie got when Spector was walking around, was arguing with his wife in that café, that was something Charlie and the others could work with. Build up a computer data template of realistic movement style, speech style, grist for the animation . . . 

“What you let it bother you for, Charlie? The guy’s an asshole. A hypocrite, a Fascist. Not SA himself, but he plays ball with ’em all the time. The AntiViolence Laws were an SA project, man.”

“Yeah, I know. I just hate the TV execution stuff so fucking much, it gets me so upset—and now we’re slotting somebody into it. I know all the reasons to do it. But it still . . . ” He shrugged. “And then Sonia. And Baxter. Kojo. Killed real nasty.”

“Shit—Kojo was SA. Sonia and Baxter volunteered for that, no one talked ’em into it. Sonia tried to kill herself twice because her girlfriend Coochie got busted and snuffed on TV. You know Coochie? Sonia was fucking out of her mind, anyway. And Baxter, he was, like, into fanatic martyrdom stuff.”

“Yeah, but maybe we shouldn’t’ve played along with their sick problems for this.”

“Otherwise they woulda been destroyed for nothin’, without us. Look, you gotta get your mind off it. We do some Room, that’ll take you right out of your head. And into the Hollow Head, right?” He grinned. “I mean, fuck it, right?”

Charlie played hard to get for a while longer. But finally he said, “Okay. I got to make a report to Smoke, and then . . . I’ll meet you there.”

The Chicago City Jail.

Sometimes it’s possible to bribe a man with
promises
of money. And Spector used all his politician’s skill to persuade the guard.
Get a message out, friend, and you’ll be rewarded in a big way. I’m still a
senator
, right? In with the in crowd, right?
Wrong, but the guard didn’t know it had gone that far.

Gave the guard a letter telling Burridge about the computer-generated evidence; and telling him to work on it seriously—or Spector’s news-release what he had on Burridge: the death of a girl named Judy Sorenson and just where she’d got the goodies she’d OD’d on.

Three days later, nine a.m., the guard came to Spector’s clammy cell, passed him an ear-cap, winked, and left. Spector put the capsule in his ear, squeezed it, heard Burridge’s voice: “Henry, there’s a method of digital analysis that’ll tell us if what’s on the video was genuine or computer-generated. First we’ll have to subpoena the digi-vid. Of course, as you’ve already been convicted, that’ll be hard. But we’re pulling some strings . . . we’ll see if we can get your conviction overturned in the next day or so. A Special Pardon. In the meantime don’t get panicky and mention that mutual friend of ours to anyone.”

But a week later Spector was being prepped for his execution. He sat on a bench, chained to five other convicts, listening to the prison’s TV program director, Sparks.

The videotechs called Sparks “the animal wrangler.” He was stocky, red-faced, with a taut smile and blank gray eyes. He wore a rumpled blue real-cloth suit. The guards stood at either end of the narrow room, tubular stun-guns in hand.

“Today we got a man won an execution-by-combat,” Sparks was saying. “An EBC is more dignified than the execution in stocks, so you fellas should be glad of that much, anyway. You’ll be given a gun, but of course it’s loaded with blanks.”

And then the chain connecting Spector’s handcuffs to the man on his right jerked Spector half out of his seat as the small black guy on the other end of the bench lost it, just lost it completely, ran at Sparks screaming something in a heavy West Indian accent, something Spector couldn’t make out. But the raw substance of it, the subverbal message in the guy’s voice—that alone spoke for him. It said,
Injustice! Innocence!
and it said,
I’ve got a family!
And then, it could say nothing more because the stun-guns had turned off his brain for a while and he lay splayed like a dark rag doll on the concrete floor. The guards propped him up on the bench, and Sparks went on as if nothing had happened. “Now we got to talk about your cues, it’ll be a lot worse for you if you forget your cues . . . ”

Spector wasn’t listening. A terrible feeling had him in its grip, and it was a far worse feeling than fear for his life.

At home—the condo his wife had sold by now—he’d opened his front door with a sonic key. It sang out three shrill tones, three precise notes at precise intervals, and the door heard and analyzed the tonal code and the interval code, and opened.

And the voice of the man who’d tried to fight, the small, dark man . . . his voice, his three shrieks, had opened a door in Spector’s mind. Let something out. Something he’d fought for weeks to lock away. Something he’d argued with, silently shouted at, again and again.

He’d pushed for the AntiViolence Laws for the same reason that Joe McCarthy, in the last century, had railed at Communism. It was a ticket. A ticket to a vehicle he could ride through the polls and into office. Inflame their fear of crime. Cultivate their lust for vengeance. Titillate their own repressed desire to do violence of their own. And they vote for you.

And he hadn’t given a rat’s-ass goddamn about the violence problem. The issue was a path to power, and nothing more.

He’d known, somewhere inside himself, that a lot of the condemned were probably being railroaded. But he’d looked away, again and again. Now somebody had made it impossible for him to look away. Now the guilt that had festered in him erupted into full-blown infection, and he burned with the fever of self-hatred.

That’s when Bergen came in. Bergen spoke to the guards, showed them a paper; the guards came and whispered to Sparks. And Sparks, annoyed at the disruption in his scheduling, unlocked Spector’s cuffs. Glumly Bergen said, “Come with me, Mr. Spector.” He was no longer Senator Spector.

They went to stand in the hallway; a guard came along, yawning, leaning against the wall, watching a soap on his pocket TV. Voice icy, Bergen said, “I have an order to take you back to your cell, pending a reopening of your case. You’re going to get off. A Special Pardon. Rare as hen’s teeth. Burridge has proof the vid was tampered with. It hasn’t been made public yet, and in fact, the judge who presided at your trial is out of town, so Burridge arranged a temporary restraining . . . ”

“Why is it you sound disappointed, Bergen?” Spector interrupted, watching Bergen’s face closely. When Bergen didn’t answer, Spector said, “You did everything you could to sabotage my defense. You were with them, whoever it was. Whoever set me up. I can feel it. Who was it?” Bergen stared sullenly at him. “Come on—who
was
it? And why?”

Bergen glanced at the guard. The guard was absorbed by the soap opera; tiny television figures in his palm flickered through a miniature choreography of petty conflicts.

Bergen took a deep breath and looked Spector in the eyes. “Okay. I don’t care anymore . . . I
want
you to know. Sonia, Baxter, and I—we’re part of the same organization. Sonia did it because her lover, a girl she’d lived with for eight years, was videoframed. She was very dependent on her. Baxter did it because he was part of another organization too: the Black Freedom Brotherhood—they lost their top four officers to a Second Alliance videoframe-up. Me, I did it—I planned the whole damn thing because I saw one too many innocent people die. We thought if you, a senator, were videoframed, condemned, publicly killed, afterward we’d release the truth, we’d clear you, and that’d focus public attention on the issue. Force an investigation. And something else—Simple revenge. We held you responsible. For all those people railroaded into dying.”

Spector nodded like a clockwork toy. Said softly, “Oh, yes. I am responsible . . . and now I’m going to get off. I’ll go free. And it’ll be blamed on your people, your organization. They’ll say it was an isolated incident, the only incident of videoframe-up. They’ll pressure me to shut up about it. And once I was on the outside, where things are comfortable, I probably would.”

And the realization came at him like an onrushing wall of darkness; it fell on him like a tidal wave:
How many innocent people died for my ambition?

“Yes,” Bergen muttered. “Congratulations, Spector, you son of a bitch. Sonia and Baxter sacrificed themselves for
nothing
 . . . ” His voice broke. He went on, visibly straining for control. “You’re going free . . . ”

But the gnawing thing in Spector wouldn’t let him go free. And he knew it would never let him go. Never. (Though some part of him said,
Don’t do it! Survive!
But that part of him could speak only in a raspy whimper.) “Bergen—wait. Go to Burridge. Tell him you know all about the Sorenson incident. Repeat it back to me.”

“The Sorenson incident. What . . . ?”

“And tell him you’ll release what you know about her, about Sorenson, if he tells anyone about that vid before tomorrow. Tell him this came from me. He’ll stay quiet.”

“But the restraining order . . . ”

“Tear it up. And come with me—you’ve got to explain to Sparks that your paperwork was wrong. That you were mistaken about something . . . ”

Spector walked out onto the stage, just glancing at the cameras and the studio audience beyond the bulletproof glass. He pointed the pistol loaded with blanks at the grinning man in the cowboy hat at the other end of the stage and walked toward him, toward the big gun in the man’s hand.

He walked right up to a gun that was loaded with real bullets. And Spector smiled softly, thinking,
This is the only way I’ll ever go free . . . 

New York City.

You could smell the place, the Hollow Head, from two blocks away. Anyway, you could if you were strung out on it. The other people on the street probably couldn’t make out the smell from the background of monoxides, the broken battery smell of acid rain, the itch of syntharette smoke, the oily rot of the river. But a user could pick out that tease of amyl para-tryptaline, thinking,
Like a needle in a haystack.
And he’d snort, and then go reverent-serious, thinking about the needle in question . . . the needle in the nipple . . . 

It was on East 121st Street, a half block from the East River. If you stagger out of the place at night, you’d better find your way to the lighted end of the street fast, because the leeches crawled out of the river after dark, slug-creeping up the walls and onto the cornices of the old buildings; they sensed your body heat, and an eight-inch ugly brute lamprey thing could fall from the roof, hit your neck with a wet
slap
; inject you with paralyzing toxins and when you fall over, its leech cronies drain you dry.

When Charlie turned onto the street, it was just sunset; the leeches weren’t out of the river yet, but Charlie scanned the rooftops, anyway. Clustered along the rooftops were the shanties.

New York’s housing shortage was worse then ever. After the Dissolve Depression, most of the Wall Street firms moved to Tokyo or the floating city, Freezone. The turn of the century boom in Manhattan deflated; the city couldn’t afford to maintain itself. It began to rot. But still the immigrants came, swarming to the mecca of disenchantment till New York became another Mexico City, ringed and overgrown with shanties, shacks of clapboard, tin, cardboard protected with flattened cans and plastic wrappers; every tenement rooftop in Manhattan mazed with squalid shanties, sometimes shanties on shanties till the weight collapsed the roofs and the old buildings caved in, the crushed squatters simply left dying in the rubble—firemen and emergency teams rarely set foot outside the sentried, walled-in havens of the midtown class.

Charlie was almost there. It was a mean motherfucker of a neighborhood, which is why he had the knife in his boot sheath. But what scared him was the Place. Doing some Room at the Place. The Hollow Head.

His heart was pumping and he was shaky, but he wasn’t sure if it was from fear or anticipation or if, with the Hollow Head, you could tell those two apart. But to keep his nerve up, he had to look away from the Place as he got near it; tried to focus on the rest of the street. Some dumbfuck pollyanna had planted saplings in the sidewalk, in the squares of exposed dirt where the original trees had stood. But the acid rain had chewed the leaves and twigs away; what was left was as stark as obsolete TV antennas. Torchglow from the roofs; and a melange of noises that seemed to ooze down like something greasy from an overflowing pot. Smells of tarry wood burning; dog-food smells of cheap, canned-food cooking. And then he was standing in front of the Hollow Head. A soot-blackened town house, its Victorian facade of cherubim recarved by acid rain into dainty gargoyles. The windows bricked over, the stone between them streaked gray on black from acid erosion.