Islands in the Net (13 page)

Behind the fort, a trio of tall radio antennas flashed their aircraft warning lights in sync. Red blips raced from ground to sky, seeming to fling themselves upward, into stellar blackness. Laura leaned to peer through David's window. The dim bulk of Fort George's battlements, framed against the racing lights, gave her a buzz of unease.

Laura had been briefed about Grenada's prime minister. His name was Eric Louison and his “New Millennium Movement” ruled Grenada as a one-party state. Louison was in his eighties now, rarely seen outside his secretive cabinet of data pirates. Years ago, after first seizing power, Louison had made a passionate speech in Vienna, demanding investigation of the “Optimal Persona phenomenon.” It had earned him a lot of uneasy derision.

Louison was in the unhappy Afro-Caribbean tradition of ruler-patriarchs with heavy voodoo. Guys who were all Papa Docs and Step-pin' Razors and Whippin' Sticks. Looking up the hill, Laura had a sudden clear mental image of old Louison. Skinny, yellow-nailed geezer, tottering sleepless through the fort's torchlit dungeons. In a gold-braided jacket, sipping hot goat blood, his naked feet stuck in a couple of Kleenex boxes …

The Hyundai cruised through town under amber streetlights. They passed a few Brazilian three-wheelers, little wasplike buggies in yellow and black, chugging on alcohol. Saint George had the sleepy look of a town where they roll up the pavements on week nights. By modern Third World standards it was a small city—maybe a hundred thousand people. Half a dozen high-rises loomed downtown, in the old and ugly International Style, their monotonous walls stippled with glowing windows. A fine old colonial church with a tall square clock tower. Idle construction cranes jutted over the geodesic skeleton of a new stadium. “Where's the Bank?” David said.

Sticky shrugged. “Everywhere. Wherever the wires are.”

“Good-lookin' town,” David said. “No shantytowns, nobody camping under the overpasses. You could teach Mexico City something.” No response. “Kingston, too.”

“Gonna teach
Atlanta
something,” Sticky retorted. “Our Bank—you think we're thieves. No so, mon. It's
your
banks what been sucking these people's blood for four hundred years. Shoe on the other foot, now.”

The lights of the capital receded. Loretta stirred in her tote, waved her arms, and noisily filled her diaper. “Uh-oh,” David said. He opened the window. The wet-dust smell of hot tropic rain filled the car. Another aroma crept under it, spicy, pungent, haunting. A kitchen smell. Nutmeg, Laura realized. Half the world's nutmeg came out of Grenada. Real natural nutmeg, off trees. They rounded a bay—lights glittered from an offshore station, lights on still water, industrial glare on gray clouds overhead.

Sticky wrinkled his nose and looked at Loretta as if she were a bag of garbage. “Why bring that baby? It's dangerous here.”

Laura frowned, and reached for a fresh diaper. David said, “We're not soldiers. We don't pretend to be fair targets.”

“That's a funny way to think,” Sticky said.

“Maybe you think she'd be safer at our home,” Laura said. “You know, the place that got machine-gunned.”

“Okay,” Sticky shrugged. “Maybe we can cut it a bulletproof bib.”

Emily spoke online. [“Oh, he's funny. They're wasting him here, he ought to be in network comedy.”]

Sticky noticed their silence. “Don't worry, Atlanta,” he said loudly. “We be takin' better care of these guests than you did of ours.”

[“Ouch,”] the whisper said.

They covered more miles in silence. [“Look,”] Emily said, [“y'all shouldn't waste this time so I'm going to play you selected highlights of the Committee campaign speeches …”] Laura listened intently; David played with the baby and looked out the window.

Then the Hyundai slid west off the highway, onto a graveled track. Emily cut off a speech about Rizome's Pacific Rim holdings in lumber and microchips. The car cruised uphill, through thick stands of casuarina trees. It stopped in darkness.

“Car, honk,” Sticky told the Hyundai, and it did. Arc lights flashed on from two iron poles at the gates of a plantation estate. The tops of the compound's fortress walls gleamed wickedly with embedded broken glass.

A guard hustled up belatedly, a rumpled-looking teenage militiaman with a blunderbuss tangle-gun slung on his back. Sticky left the car. The guard looked jolted from sleep and guilty about it. As the gates swung open, Sticky pulled rank and hassled the kid. “Hey, check this cheap-shot fascist shit,” David muttered, just for the record.

The car rolled into a graveled courtyard with a dead marble fountain and wet, weed-choked rosebushes. The distant gate lights showed low whitewashed stairs up to a long screened verandah. Above the verandah, windows glowed in a pair of goofy-looking turrets. Some Victorian colonial's idea of class. [“Check it out!”] Emily commented.

“A Queen Anne mansion!” David said.

The car stopped at the stairs and its doors swung open. They stepped out into rich-smelling tropic dampness, hauling the baby and their carry-ons. Sticky rejoined them, pulling a key card.

“Whose place is this?” David said.

“Yours, for now.” Sticky motioned them up the stairs and across the dark, open porch. They passed a flat, dust-shrouded table. A Ping-Pong ball glanced off David's foot, tick-ticking off into darkness and the skeletal gleam of aluminum lounge chairs. Sticky slid his key card into double doors of brass-studded rosewood.

The doors opened; hall lights flashed on. David was surprised. “This old place has a house system installed.”

“Sure,” sniffed Sticky. “It belong to Bank brass once—old Mr. Gelli. He fix it up.” The voices of strangers echoed down the hall. They entered a living room: flocked velvet wallpaper, flower-printed couch and two matching recliners, kidney-shaped coffee table, wall-to-wall carpet in a purulent shade of maroon.

Two men and a woman, dressed in servants' whites, knelt beside a toppled drinks trolley. They stood up hastily, looking flustered.

“She not workin',” the taller man said sullenly. “Been chasin' us around all day.”

“This is your staff,” Sticky said. “Jimmy, Rajiv, and Rita. The place a little musty now, but they'll make you cozy.”

Laura looked them over. Jimmy and Rajiv looked like pickpockets and Rita had eyes like hot black marbles—she looked at little Loretta as if wondering how she'd go in a broth with carrots and onions. “Are we doing entertaining?” Laura said.

Sticky looked puzzled. “No.”

“I'm sure Jimmy, Rajiv, and Rita are very capable,” Laura said carefully. “But unless there's a pressing need for staff, I think we'd be cozier on our own.”

“You had servants in Galveston,” Sticky said.

Laura gritted her teeth. “The Lodge staff are
Rizome associates
. Our
coworkers
.”

“The Bank picked these people for you,” Sticky said. “They had good reason.” He shepherded Laura and David toward another door. “Master bedroom in here.”

They followed Sticky into a room with a massive canopied waterbed and closet-lined walls. The bed was freshly made. Gardenia incense smoldered atop an old mahogany bureau. Sticky closed the door behind them.

“Your servants protect you from spies,” Sticky told them with an air of put-upon patience. “From people, and things too, things with wings and cameras, seen? We don't want them wondering what you are, why you here.” He paused to let that sink in. “So this the plan: we pass you off for mad doctors.”

David said, “For what?”

“Techies, Bwana. Hired consultants. High-technocrats, the Grenada upper crust.” Sticky paused. “Don't you see it? How do you think we run this island? We got mad doctors all points round in Grenada. Yankees, Europeans, Russians, they come here for perks, like this place, seen? Big houses, with servants.” He winked deliberately. “Plus other tasty things.”

“That's just great,” David said. “Do we get field hands, too?”

Sticky grinned. “You a sweet pair, you really are.”

“Why not pass us off for tourists, instead?” Laura said. “You must get
some
, right?”

“Lady, this is the Caribbean,” Sticky said. “America's backyard, seen? We're used to seeing Yankees runnin' round without their pants. It nah shock us, any.” He paused, considering, or pretending to. “Except that retrovirus—fancy Yank V.D.—it do take a toll on the workin' girls.”

Laura throttled her temper. “Those perks don't tempt us, Captain.”

“Oh, sorry,” Sticky said. “I forgot you were online back to Atlanta. You under heavy manners, must nah talk rude … while they can hear.”

[“Oh,”] Emily whispered suddenly, [“if y'all are hypocrites, that means he has a right to be an asshole.”]

“You want to prove that we're hypocrites,” David said. “Because that makes it right to insult us.” Caught off guard, Sticky hesitated. “Look,” David soothed. “We're your guests. If you want to surround us with these so-called ‘servants,' that's your decision.”

Laura caught on. “Maybe you don't trust us?” She pretended to think it over. “Good idea to have some houseboys watching us, just in case we decide to swim back to Galveston.”

“We'll think about it,” Sticky said grudgingly. The doorbell sounded, the bell plonking out the first verse of an old pop song. “I'm dream-ing of a White Christ-mas,” David chanted, recognizing it. They hurried to the door, but the servants had beaten them there. Their luggage had arrived. Rajiv and Jimmy were already hauling bags from the van.

“I can take the baby, madam,” Rita volunteered at Laura's elbow. Laura pretended not to hear her, staring through the verandah screen. Two new guards lurked under the arc lights at the gate.

Sticky handed them matched key cards. “I'm going—got business elsewhere tonight. You make yourselves real cozy. Take what you want, use what you want, the place is yours. Old Mr. Gelli, he won't be complaining.”

“When do we meet with the Bank?” Laura said.

“Soon come,” Sticky said meaninglessly. He rambled down the steps; the Hyundai opened and he slipped in without breaking stride. The car took off.

They rejoined the servants in the living room and stood about uncomfortably in a knot of unresolved tension. “A little supper, sir, madam?” Rajiv suggested.

“No, thank you, Rajiv.” She didn't know the proper term for Rajiv's ethnic background. Indo-Caribbean? Hindu-Grenadian?

“Draw madam a bath?”

Laura shook her head. “You could start by calling us David and Laura,” she suggested. The three Grenadians looked back stonily.

Loretta adroitly chose this moment to burst into sobs. “We're all a bit tired from the trip,” David said loudly. “I think we'll, uh, retire to the bedroom. So we won't need you tonight, thanks.” There was a brief struggle over the bags, which Rajiv and Jimmy won. They triumphantly carried the luggage into the master bedroom. “We unpack for you,” Rajiv announced.

“Thank you, no!” David spread his arms and herded them through the bedroom door. He locked it behind them.

“We be upstairs if you need us, madam,” Jimmy shouted through the door. “The intercom nah work, so yell real good!”

David plucked Loretta from her tote and set about fixing her formula. Laura fell backward onto the bed, feeling a sapping rush of stress fatigue. “Alone at last,” she said.

“If you don't count thousands of Rizome associates,” David said from the bathroom. He emerged and set the baby on the bed. Laura roused herself to one elbow and held Loretta's bottle.

David checked all the closets. “Seems safe enough in this bedroom. No other ways in or out—this is great old woodwork, too.” He pulled his earpiece loose with a wince, then set his videoglasses on a bedside table. He aimed them carefully at the door.

[“Don't mind me,”] Emily said in Laura's ear. [“If David wants to sleep in the raw, I'll edit it.”]

Laura laughed, sitting up. “You two and your in-jokes,” David said.

Laura changed the baby and got her into her paper pajamas. She was doped with food, sleepy and content, her eyes rolling under half-shut flickering lids. Sweet little hand-clenching motions, like she was trying to hold on to wakefulness but couldn't quite remember where she put it. It was funny how much she looked like David when she slept.

They undressed, and he hung his clothes in the closet. “They still got the old guy's wardrobe here,” he said. He showed her a tangle of leather. “Nice tailor, huh?”

“What the hell is that? Bondage gear?”

“Shoulder holster,” David said. “Macho bang-bang stuff.”

“Terrific,” Laura said. More goddamned guns. Tired as she was, she dreaded sleep; she could smell another nightmare waiting. She plugged her gear into a clockphone from the biggest bag. “How's that?”

[“It ought to do.”] Emily's voice came loudly from the clock-phone's speakers. [“I'm logging off, but the night shift will watch over you.”]

“Good night.” Laura slid under the sheets. They nestled the baby between them. Tomorrow they'd look for a crib. “Lights, turn off.”

Laura came sluggishly out of sleep. David was already wearing jeans, an unbuttoned tropical shirt, and his videoglasses. “The doorbell,” he explained. It rang again, plonking through its antique melody.

“Oh.” She looked gummy-eyed at the bedside clock. Eight
A.M
. “Who's online?”

[“It's me, Laura,”] the clock said. [“Alma Rodriguez.”]

“Oh, Mrs. Rodriguez,” Laura said to the clock. “Urn, how are you?”

[“Oh, the old man, his bursitis pretty bad today.”]

“Sorry to hear that,” Laura muttered. She struggled to sit up, the waterbed rippling queasily.

[“This Lodge, it's pretty empty without you or the guests,”] Mrs. Rodriguez said brightly. [“Mrs. Delrosario, she says her two girls are running around downtown like wild animals.”]