Cold Allies (28 page)

He scrubbed his hand over his face, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Help. Yes. Help.”

“Ask them yourself.” She turned to go.

“Goddamn it!” His rage stopped her in her tracks. His body, she saw, was stress-fracture brittle.

“You
have to tell them, Rita. They
like
you. I can’t find my way around the library. The stairs go nowhere, and the elevators bring me back to where I began. No matter which direction I take, I always end up at this table. They won’t come to me. They won’t listen to me. You’ve got to do it.”

“I don’t understand.”

He looked around wildly, began yanking books off shelves. They landed on the marble floor with wet smacks.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Getting their attention!” He took
The Collected Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson
and hurled it at the window. It hit the glass with a wind-chime sound.

“Stop!” she screamed.

He didn’t. The books, covers open like wings, swatted the windows, one after the other, birds flying to their death.

Lauterbach would tear the library down around her shoulders. What would happen then? What horrors would stand revealed when all the illusion was gone?

A weighty volume of Shakespeare smacked against the pane with an ice-pellet rattle. “I have to get their attention!” the general shouted. “Quick!” He lunged at her. “Give me a pen!”

She backed away. He turned and waded though the fallen books, to the table.

“A pen!” he called into the pewter air. “For Christ’s sake. I told you I was sorry. What else can I do? Give me a goddamned pen!”

“There’s a pen in your pocket,” she told him.

Surprised, he glanced down, patting his uniform. He grasped the pen, then began looking around frantically.

“What the hell are you doing? And what are you looking for now?”

“Paper! I need paper!”

She gestured with exasperation at the floor. They were both ankle-deep in books. “Jesus. Can’t you see? There’s paper allover the place.”

He looked up at her with pathetic gratitude. Bending, he picked up the Shakespeare and scribbled something on the flyleaf. “Here,” he said, handing her the book.

She took it.

“Please. Please. Give it to them. Tell them— Tell them how much they mean to me. Tell them how I’ve pinned my hopes—” His voice faltered. His expression was imploring.

After some hesitation she waded though the fallen books and out of the labyrinth of stacks. Dr. Gladdings was waiting for her at the librarian’s desk. “I have a message,” she said.

He looked up, his tarry eyes melting down his cheeks. Opening to the flyleaf, Rita handed him the book and glanced at the meaningless scribbles Lauterbach had written there.

Dr. Gladdings smiled up at her. “Oh, the message.” He shut the book with a slap and looked out the windows at the barren trees. “We have the message. We’ve known it for quite a while.”

WARSAW, POLAND

The cold nudged Baranyk awake. He opened his eyes to ashen light. Wrapping the blanket around him, he went to the window. Ornate ferns of frost etched the glass. Below him, Warsaw lay covered in hoary ice.

Teeth chattering, back hunched, he got into his uniform. Hiking his coat over his shoulders, he walked into Zgursky’ s room. The aide was still asleep, shivering under his blanket. Gathering his own blanket from his bed, Baranyk threw it over the sleeping boy.

In the common room, Shcheribitsky was seated at the table, hunched in his coat, his gloved hands encircling a glass of tea.

“What weather, general,” the major said in wonder. His face was pallid but for two spots of winter rouge, one on either cheek. He sniffed and wiped a glove across the end of his nose. “Some breakfast?”

Baranyk gestured at him to keep his seat and began rummaging through the barren cabinets. “Any news?”

“Jastrun moved tanks to the perimeter. It appears we have lost four of our nine munitions dumps.”

Baranyk picked up a jar of pickled herring, hesitated, put it back. There was fig jam, he saw, but no bread. “Polish idiocy, to put the dumps so close together.”

“Yes, sir.”

Baranyk grabbed the fig jam and a spoon. He poured himself a glass of tea from the pot the major had made. His breakfast balanced in his hands, he sat down.

“It is quiet, sir,” Shcheribitsky observed in an uneasy voice.

Baranyk spooned a little jam into his mouth. “Too quiet,” he agreed. “I find it incredible that the Arabs have not yet—”

A noise. Baranyk turned. Zgursky was in the doorway, his eyes wide.

“Look outside, sir!” he shouted. “General! Look out the window!”

Shcheribitsky leaped to his feet. His chair toppled, hitting the wooden floor with a 20mm bang.

Baranyk was on his feet, too, but was afraid to look, afraid that, without his knowledge, Warsaw had fallen, that he would see Arab soldiers among the buildings, BTR-80s full of troops, and columns of T -72s.

“It’s snowing!” Zgursky cried.

Incredulously, Baranyk walked to Shcheribitsky’s side and stared out the fogged pane. November. A Greenhouse November, yet snow was coming down in the streets like gentle falls of angels.

CENTRAL ARMY HOSPITAL, BADAJOZ, SPAIN

Sabry opened his eyes to discover that he had survived the operation. It appeared, too, that he was out of recovery and back in his own room. But then again he might be dreaming, because Lauterbach was there. The American general was standing with the surgeon.

Sabry caught the tag end of the general’s sentence. “ ... just for a few minutes.”

And the doctor’s reply. “Don’t stay too long. We had a bit of a surgical complication, and I imagine he’ll be tired.”

Surgical complication. Sabry’s dulled mind played with the phrase. He rolled the words this way and that, until the words became too heavy and his mind grew too exhausted to hold them.

Something shoved him awake. He saw Lauterbach bending over him. The American looked sick. Sabry wondered if he had had a surgical complication, too.

“What is the readiness of your nuclear response, sir?” The question amused Sabry. He wanted to grin at the American, but his lips wouldn’t work. The room, Lauterbach’s face, faded to gray.

The American shook him. His tone was impatient. “General Sabry! What is the readiness of the Arab nuclear response?”

It must be a dream, Sabry decided. Left to themselves, his eyelids shut. A slap on his cheek woke him. He was still dreaming about Lauterbach.

“I will pull you off this fucking bed, sir, unless you answer my question. There isn’t any time.”

A nonsensical dream. Sabry turned his head to look out the window. Through the slats in the blind he saw that it was raining.

Lauterbach slapped him again, harder. The blow should have hurt, but it didn’t. Nothing hurt, not the stump of his knee, not his hip.

“Answer me!”

“I will answer you with bullets,” Sabry replied, his anesthetized tongue lolling in his mouth. He laughed, too, but the laugh sounded strange.

Three quick blows like impatient applause: clap-clap-clap. Sabry’s head jerked hard with each impact. Not a dream, he thought, a nightmare. But a nightmare that left him more irked than afraid.

“ICBMs!” Lauterbach cried.

Sabry tried to will the wild-eyed, furious American away. “No ICBMs,” he muttered.

“What about the twenty-five Russian nuclear scientists? They didn’t help you build a delivery system?”

Sabry laughed again. “Russians.” The Russians were dead, he remembered, shot by a mob during the famine. Shot because they were foreigners.
Gamal was right,
he decided.
My son was right. We are xenophobic idiots.
Sabry closed his eyes. Strong arms clutched the front of his hospital smock.

“Listen to me!” Lauterbach hissed.

The American’s hot breath smelled of mint and coffee. “Goddamn you! Don’t go to sleep again! Don’t you go to sleep again on me! Open your eyes!”

An angry little wasp, that’s what the American was. An annoying little nightmare.

“I don’t have anything left to lose, General Sabry. And I want a goddamned answer. What about your nuclear delivery system?”

“Nothing works,” Sabry mumbled. His army had broken down like the Russian tanks. Had the scientists survived the mob, what they made would have been shit, too.

Lauterbach shook him again. “So if we used nuclears, the ANA could not respond in kind.”

Wait a moment,
Sabry thought with a flicker of alarm. Something was wrong with this dream. But he could not quite put his finger on the problem.

“You could not respond, sir? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Respond?” Sabry asked, blinking. It was very important that he wake up now, he knew. He reached over to pinch his own arm, dragging the IV with him. The pinch didn’t hurt, either.

“Answer the question,” Lauterbach barked. “Why didn’t you nuke us?”

“I wanted to,” Sabry groaned. Oh, how he had wanted to. He leveled a glare of hatred at Lauterbach. “I wanted more than life to kill you.”

A moment later the American left, and Sabry dropped off to sleep. He didn’t dream again.

IN THE LIGHT

The reel purred as his Pa brought in the line.

“No fish today,” Jerry said.

“No fish,” Pa agreed. He set the rod. In the pool of light on the pier his mottled fingers caressed the lures, the sinkers, before closing the tackle box.

“You’ll be leaving now,” he told Jerry. Then Pa was up and walking away.

Jerry stared after him in disbelief. When his body could work, he scrambled to his feet and ran after, his heart in his throat. At the other end of the pier, Jerry caught him. His fingers sank into his Pa’s arm.

Pa turned around. His face looked stranger than ever. The eyes had sagged, and his mouth, too. His nose was a long horned beak.

“What are you talking about? I’ll never leave you,” Jerry said.

“You know, Jerry?” his Pa said in Ward Cleaver’s voice.

“You know what you do with wild things when you capture them?”

Jerry knew. He had seen all the programs. “You let them loose so they can be free.”

Pa’s rubbery arm slid out of Jerry’s grasp. He turned and headed back to the house.

“But damn it, I ain’t no bird or lion or nothing,” Jerry said, rushing to catch up.

On the lawn, Pa stooped and laid the rod down, put the tackle box beside it. “You’ll grow up soon,” he said without looking up. This time he sounded like Bill Cosby. “Boys get interested in girls, you know. And their fathers aren’t so important anymore.”

“Not me, Pa.” God. Wouldn’t his Pa look at him? If he looked, he would see the need in his face. Need was a kind of glue. It had held Jerry to his old Pa, even when he’d got drunk and beaten him. Now it held him to his new Pa like a fly in honey.

“I’ll be good,” he promised, his voice a whine. “I’ll never do it again. Whatever it was I done, Pa, I’ll never do it again.”

It didn’t seem that his Pa was listening. Jerry had the frightful thought that maybe his Pa didn’t love him anymore. Maybe he loved the soldier.

Pa stood regarding the red tackle box. “You’ll want to go home one day, and we won’t be able to bring you back.”

“No, I won’t. I won’t. Really. Pa, look at me. Why don’t you look?”

Pa looked up then. His face was even stranger. The black eyes had a multifaceted sheen. “We’ve learned everything we could from you.” He didn’t sound like a television dad now. He didn’t even sound like a human.

“No, Pa. No. Please. I can show you lots of things. Fireworks ...” His mind jittered a dozen different ways, all his thoughts tangled in the panicky idea of abandonment. “You never seen fireworks.”

A dull pop at his back made Jerry turn around. A red chrysanthemum burst streamers into the night sky. A whistler went up next, riding a wavy ribbon of brilliance. It exploded into blue and then orange and then green, the sparks racing toward Jerry so fast that he stepped back in surprise.

Pop.
In the sky, purple flowers bloomed, their fallen seeds glittery crimson.

“You’ll see. I promise,” Jerry said. “I can show you lots of things.”

Pop.
Another chrysanthemum swelled until it filled half the sky. Suddenly Pa’s cold arms were around him. Pa pressed his spongy body against Jerry’s back.

“Tell me,” Pa whispered into his ear.

Something sharp and hard dug into the meat above Jerry’s collarbone. He held his breath and forced himself to stand very still. “Shoeing horses,” he said, tripping over the words in his rush. “Fixing cars.”

The sharp thing pressed harder, stinging a little. His Pa’s cold, sodden face was right next to his, cradled in the crook of his neck.

Then Pa released him. Jerry turned around, rubbing his shoulder. There was a tiny hole there, like an exploratory bite.

“We use you, Jerry.” His Pa’s voice was a pulsing bass, like the hot throb of some huge engine.

“That’s all right,” Jerry told him.

“And we’re not what we seem to be.”

“That’s okay, too.”

“As long as you understand what’s happening.”

Jerry knew what was happening. It had to do with love and stuff. It had to do with gluey need.

His Pa bent to pick up the fishing gear. “What do you want for dinner?” he asked.

Jerry studied the cherished and ever-changing curves of his Pa’s back. “I love you,” he whispered fervently.

Pa looked up, surprised. “I love you, too,” he said in Bill Cosby’s voice.

WARSAW, POLAND

Baranyk got out of the Humvee and waded through the snow, Shcheribitsky and Zgursky at his heels. The wind was bitter, and the temperature, unless Baranyk was imagining it, was stilt falling.

At the eastern perimeter the main street was cluttered with tanks. Skirting the traffic jam, Baranyk made his way down an alley.

“Like January, sir, isn’t it? The way January used to be,” Shcheribitsky said, his breath coming in puffs of fog.

Baranyk caught a glimpse of something green deep in the rubble. He stopped, bent, and peered into a small cavern. A girl was lying there, curled in sleep like a cat. One of Warsaw’s army of orphans.

“Sir?” the major asked at his back. “Just a moment, Shcheribitsky.”

The general reached in a hand to touch her face. She
was
cold, he saw. As stiff and hard as the bricks around her, and her face as gray as the masonry dust.

Quickly he got up and dusted off his gloves.

“Sir?” the major asked.

“Nothing,” Baranyk answered and continued on.

As they reached the ruined perimeter, Baranyk saw that most of the earthworks were gone. Where the munitions stockpiles had been was a smoldering crater. Four blocks away from the wreckage sat the radar station, its door wrenched off its hinges. A line of soldiers like worker ants were carting equipment from the building to a sooted apartment house nearby.

Baranyk followed a burdened lieutenant up the stairs. In the living room of a vacant apartment, a fire was blazing in the hearth. Jastrun, surrounded by computer components, was muttering orders to his men.

In the neighboring bedroom stood Czajowski, a phone to his ear. “I am on hold,” the commander said with a droll smile.

It was too hot in the apartment. Baranyk slipped his coat from his shoulders and draped it over a swivel chair.

Jastrun turned his irritable attention to a sergeant. “Where are the cables? You were going to get me the cables.”

Without a word the sergeant turned, his every movement weary, and trudged out of the room, leaving snowy footprints in his wake.

“No,” Czajowski said into the receiver, his English words clipped with irritation. “I will not leave a message.”

Baranyk glanced at the commander, but Czajowski was no longer looking his way. He was standing ramrod straight, staring at the snowdrift on the bedroom windowsill.

“Has there been any movement of ANA troops?” Baranyk asked Jastrun.

The colonel glanced up from his appraisal of a keyboard.

“What? Uh, no. No movement as yet, general. Captain?” The captain was on his hands and knees searching for a plug. “You will do a diagnostic on this, please.”

Baranyk caught Shcheribitsky ‘s eye. “Perhaps the snow confounds the Arabs.”

The major shook his head doubtfully. “They are Afghanis and Cossacks and Iranians, sir. They understand cold.”

Baranyk studied the room. On one side stood the gleaming computers, the radar screens. The overstuffed and ugly furniture, tattered anachronisms, lay piled against the opposite wall.

“Whose apartment?” he asked Jastrun.

“Who knows?” the colonel said, not looking up from his work. “They are dead, they are gone away? Who knows?”

Most of the pictures had been taken down; Baranyk noted their pale, square ghosts on the wallpaper. Yet the Poles had let a cross remain, along with a saccharine painting of the Virgin.

Czajowski gave a sudden loud and joyous cry. “General Lauterbach!”

Baranyk turned to the bedroom.

“You were to get back to me ... What? No, not yet. Are you ... Yes, I know it is difficult. You must understand our difficulty as well.”

Baranyk looked at the mute, gray plastic speaker on the table.

“What is that?” Czajowski asked. “No, sir. I do not think we can hold against an enemy attack for more than a couple of hours, perhaps less. Yes? You ... Well, I see. I understand, but ...”

Striding into the bedroom, Baranyk hit the button on the speaker. Lauterbach’s calm, amplified voice suddenly filled the small apartment. The men at the computers looked up. “ ... wish you all the luck in the world,” the American was saying.

Baranyk’s pulse jumped. A vein beat madly in his temple. “Shit!” he shouted into the speaker. “You feed us shit!”

There was a pause, then the American asked, “Valentin Sergeyevich? Is that you?”

“Yes, T. Williams. That is me.” He looked at Czajowski’s pained face and then back at the speaker. “Have you told him?” he asked.

Another pause from the gray square of plastic. “Told him what?”

“That America plans to drop its pants for the Arabs.”

“Valentin,” Czajowski said, his tone cajoling and embarrassed.

“Tell him, T. Williams!” Baranyk shot. “Tell him the truth! You are right now drawing up plans for a negotiated peace.”

Lauterbach’s answer was curt and quick. “We are not.”