Ambient (31 page)

"What if he'd have killed me?" I asked. "What if we'd both
come up here this afternoon?"

"I know my son, too, O'Malley," he said. "I knew there'd
be no danger of either of those things happenin'."

Having dusted, once again, the candy in the big window, I
knew that I would shortly be sent along, so as not to mess the
display by lingering. To say that I was disheartened at that moment would be an understatement of the most overstated kind. I
did retain a choice still over what question I might next ask, whether
or not I received an answer, and so spoke to Avalon.

"Did you ever mean anything you said?"

She said nothing; turned, as if hoping that by not answering,
she might disappear.

"Better to've loved and lost than never loved at all, O'Malley.
That's what I always say. See what I mean, though, overall? No
matter how smart. Always somethin' stupid pops up. You
should've just headed out to that plane on Saturday, son."

"I know," I said.

"I'm still curious 'bout a couple things, though," he said.
"Did he put up a fight?"

"No," I said. "Renaldo did."

"They're so fuckin' wired. You took care of both of 'em then?"

"Took care of Renaldo. "

"What did you do to---

"I didn't."

The Old Man's eyes appeared to unfocus, as if by blurring his
vision he might lose sight of something already spotted.

"How'd you mean?" he asked.

"He killed himself."

"No. How?"

"Had some of Jake's poison. Took it."

"Why? What were you doin' to him-?"

"Nothing," I said. "I told him I was coming up here and that
he was coming with me."

"But why'd he do a fool thing like-"

"He was scared."

The Old Man, appearing thoughtful, as if wondering how best
to arrange his features as he spoke, walked over to his desk again,
sitting down behind it. He rested his hands before himself, folding them together.

"Scared of what?" he asked.

"Scared of what you keep in those filing cabinets, I believe."

At once I knew I had him, in some way; that even if I lost
Avalon-and to judge from her bearing, and from what she had
done, I knew that I had-I might at least retain some small control over my own end. The Old Man's face lost just enough color
to indicate that this was a subject he hadn't expected to arise.

"Well now, what'd he think I keep in there?" he asked, his
voice even, and daubed thin with reason's paint.

"He mentioned one thing in particular," I said. "It sounded
quite interesting."

Had the Old Man known for certain that his late son knew
nothing of his secrets, he would have popped my increasing smugness lest it overwhelm the room; he didn't. As I stood there,
I became aware that either Mister Dryden had known considerably more about this than he'd let on to me, or that he genuinely
hadn't, but had only led the Old Man enough along so as to make
him believe that he had. I rubbed sweat off my forehead; my
head's wound stung.

"Did it," said the Old Man. "What'd it concern?"

"Generalities," I said, "and specifics. Depended."

"What'd he tell you, O'Malley?"

"What he knew," I said. "I'd think there's more. You might
know. "

"You've probably got enough there to make a good story,"
said the Old Man. "Shame nobody'd ever hear it."

"They could read it," I said, finding the time right to remold
such truth as I held into a more pleasing form. "He wrote some
of it down for me. Signed it and everything, before he-"

"You don't happen to have it on you, I suppose," said the Old
Man.

"Afraid not," I said, wondering if anything in my face, or in
my voice, would give me away. "It's in a safe place where it'll
eventually turn up."

The Old man appeared pensive-frighteningly so. The most
awful gleam alit his eyes as if from within. "Well, he took things
a little further than I thought he would."

"Far enough," I said.

"You'd need some support, of course, for a story like that,"
he said. "Elsewise it'll just be written off as the product of an
overactive 'magination."

"Maybe not," I said.

"But probably so," he said. "You'd probably want to check
around and see if you could dig up any proof that might be lyin'
around, wouldn't you?"

"It'd be a good idea, I think."

He reached into his trousers pocket; I could tell that he wasn't
pulling out any sort of weapon, and so my fear began to lessenslightly.

"Why don't you have a look, then?" he said, tossing a ringlet
of keys at me; I caught them, nearly dropping them onto the
floor, my hand shook so. "No tellin' what you might find in
there. "

"In those cabinets?"

"Go check it out if you're so curious. I don't mind."

I held the keys in my hand; looked at the filing cabinets. He
looked quite at peace and held my stare with ease. "Seriously?"
I asked.

"Pandora's box, O'Malley. Open 'er up and stand back."

I walked over to the filing cabinets, unlocked the top drawer
of the first one on the left, anf pulled it out. It emerged with
difficulty, as if the tracks had lacked oil for years. The Old Man
continued staring at me, his mouth kept in a tight smile. Avalon
and Jimmy looked on.

"Go ahead. Most of 'em don't bite too hard anymore. Lost
most of their teeth, over the years."

The file was stuffed tight with manila folders and printouts
housed in black boxes. There were dossiers, and notebooks, and
videocassettes protected by soft plastic cases. Tugging out a folder,
I flipped through it, thumbing the contents to see what sort of
things he might have here.

"You look disappointed, son," he said, "What'cha got?"

The label on the folder said OSWALD, LEE H. An autopsy
report inside was dated 1979.

"Just keep lookin'," said the Old Man.

As I skimmed the files, working through them at ever-greater
speed, I began developing the concept that history, as it had been
taught to me, was evidently a romance and not a science. All I
saw seemed oddly skewed, as if I viewed it while dreaming. I
extracted a large file in the Q documents concerning the history of their discovery and warrants of their authenticity. It always
seemed to me that I remembered when they had been found, but
that seemed not to be the case; according to the papers I read,
they'd been discovered in the early 1950s. The original intention
seemed to have been never to release them to public knowledge.
Enclosed in the file, toward the end, were several reports detailing events during the Christian period, and at last, several letters
to the president from the Old Man-looking more closely I saw
that they were transcripts of conversations between them, and not
missives at all.

"How did you get in on this?" I asked, reading. "The Q documents, I mean."

He settled back in his chair, tilting his head to one side as if a
new angle might help his memory flow. "That bastard Charlie,"
he said, referring to the president of that day. "Dumbest sonofabitch ever to sit in the White House and that's sayin' somethin'. See, when he was runnin', he thought he'd get a wider
power base if he sucked up to all the preachers and their friends
in order to get elected. Too many of 'em wanted to run for office
themselves and this way he figured he'd undercut 'em. Well, he
did. Only problem then was that once he was elected he had to
start followin' up on everything he said. His sense of morality
always came out at the worst time."

Among some, the Long Island accident had been seen as the
last word of Godness's warning before It chose to settle matters
once and for all. Enough in the Congress-at the urging, and
with the connivance of, the president-were coerced into drawing up and passing what were even then known unofficially as
the God's Country acts.

"They passed some useful laws because of it, I'll grant 'em
that, especially the ones havin' to do with real estate. But then
they got more serious and started causin' me all kinds of trouble.
Interferin' with my sources of income, that sort of thing. They
were pretty fuckin' wired when it came right down to it. "

The right to vote would have been restricted solely to those
who announced a belief in the Christian God. For a short time,
divorce and remarriage were ruled illegal. The courts could do
no business as the lawsuits mounted. Criminal laws were
strengthened immeasurably. Day-care centers were outlawed for
contributing to the destruction of the family unit. Social Security
was abolished; on the one hand, it caused the citizenry to ultimately put its trust in the state and not in Godness, and, more to
the point, by its abolition great funds were made available for the
new military excursions the government wished to begin, especially after political relations with Russia fell apart. Problem areas
such as New York were marked for special attention by minions
of the Lord.

"It got fuckin' ridiculous. Couldn't walk down the street without gettin' hassled by a bunch of no-mind imbeciles. Stuffin' tracts
in your hands. Then they started gettin' even worse, I mean those
posters-"

The faithful began beating the Lord into those who preferred
not to listen. The heathen reacted in like fashion. As the jihad
escalated, all proportion vanished. Christians burst into banks and
chopped the hands off moneylenders. Pagans caught and nailed
latter-day martyrs to trees in Central Park.

"Conductin' business in a normal fashion became impossible," said the Old Man. "So I put some of my boys inside the
government to work on it. Found out about those Q documents.
Now Charlie was seein' what was happenin' to the economy while
this shit was goin' on and he couldn't get anybody to shut up
long enough to listen, except people like me, of course, and we'd
already seen what was happenin'-"

Looking over some of the files in those drawers, I could see
what had happened. Theological debates had proved so absorbing
for that year and a half that no attention had been paid to anything
else. America had advisers in five separate wars-in those days
it was unusual, I inferred, for the government to spend more than half its budget on defense-no one had bothered to raise taxes of
any kind, and the deficit had doubled in ten months. The gains
made in eliminating Social Security were swallowed by the interest payable on those debts.

"So I told 'em, I said, you let those things get out or you look
forward to another civil war. He finally started seein' things my
way, Charlie did, and so they released 'em. Things quieted down
real quick after that, for a couple of months anyway. I still feel
E mighta been workin' through me on that one," the Old Man
said, a trace of wistfulness staining his voice.

I replaced those files, began looking through others.

"Where did you get all of this?" I asked, amazed at the quantity so much as at what the documents contained.

"Night before the market crashed I was down in Washington
tellin' Charlie what to do about that, too. He did some of it.
Dumb sonofabitch. "

"He gave it to you?"

"In a sense," said the Old Man. "After he tried to leave town."

Prices began going up faster and faster during the Christian
period, for a variety of reasons no one fully understood; the trade
balance tilted wildly. Imports flood the nation's markets at higher
and higher cost to the buyers. Companies went bankrupt within
months simply trying to keep up with pay adjustments for their
executives. Unemployment rose to 15 percent and continued to
climb. The market began to fall.

"I'd wanted to settle a few things before it all started comin'
down. I'd been told the revaluation, of course, was set for the
next day, but the public didn't know. Worked out fine for me but
I knew it was gonna cause a certain amount of trouble when I
found out how they were goin' to do it."

The morning the currency revaluation was announced, the stock
market plummeted a thousand points. Eight hundred million shares
were traded-nearly all sold winding up exclusively in the hands
of the Old Man, who, through executive barter, was able to keep companies going under his or under other's control by dealing
with hard materials rather than the now-worthless money.

"I tried to tell Charlie that, but he knew it all. You couldn't
tell him shit. Damn dumb bastard."

I remember my father attempting to explain it to me by showing me a hundred-dollar bill and saying that it was now worth a
dollar.

The Old Man snorted with laughter, reliving old times. "He
ran like a sonofabitch when he saw what was happenin'. Thought
he'd hide out in the Virginia caves till it all blew over."

The president's copter, that afternoon, was forced down shortly
after takeoff-by Air Force jets, some histories claimed-near
the Jefferson Memorial. He was drawn out by the penniless multitude and lynched.

"For a while there it looked like it was all gonna go. Made a
lot of people awful mad. I guess some of 'em still are. It was
kind of rough there for a while."

Mothers sold their babies for food. Sixty-year-old men joined
the Army so they could support their families. People dug up
graves to scavenge gold fillings. For the whole of the Goblin
Year, such was commonplace among the unprepared.

"I was prepared, though. The Veep stayed behind and when
he heard how his boss'd wound up he nearly shit. I knew I had
that little fucker's balls in my pocket right there. Started layin' it
out for him. Told him to get the fuckin' Army mobilized, keep it
mobilized, and keep it happy. I hadn't been fuckin' around in
South America so long not to know that. Told him everything
that he had to do, and that little fuck woulda turned on me later
if I hadn't taken those files along. Told him, long as I'm here, let
me pick up a few things for safekeepin'. These were the files
they kept in the vaults under the While House."

"And he let you have them?"