Line of Succession (11 page)

The phone.

Sturka picked up. “Yes?”

Alvin fixed his insomniac eyes on Sturka hunching forward. “Where are you, a phone booth? Give me the number.” Sturka scribbled on the flyleaf of the Gideon Bible and ripped it out. “I'll go to a phone and call you back.”

Sturka cradled the telephone and reached for his jacket. “Everyone stay inside.” He opened the door and went. It was probably Raoul Riva.

Peggy was lighting a cigarette from the burning stub of the old one; she stood just inside the bathroom door, stood there for a stretching interval and finally crossed to the front window. Parted the drapes and looked out. “I don't know.”

Alvin said, “What?”

Peggy sat down on the floor and tipped her head back against the sill. “It was an uncool getaway.”

Cesar rolled his head around. “So?”

“They got six of our people. We'd have to be stupid if we thought they'd all keep quiet. I bet they've given us away by now.”

Cesar said again, “So?”

“So why are we sitting here? Waiting for the pigs to rip us off?”

“Gentle down.” Cesar lay back. “Ain't nothing to fret about.”

Peggy gave a sour bark of laughter.

Mario said, “Hey,” whipping toward the radio.

The announcer: “… arrested less than an hour ago by police who had been staked out to watch the Harlem tenement. Identified as Darleen Warner, the woman is alleged by the FBI to be a member of the conspiracy to bomb the Capitol. This arrest brings to seven the number of bomb-plot conspirators apprehended so far …”

“Oh that's sensational.” Peggy closed her eyes.

“Get off it,” Cesar said. “You want to push that stuff out.”

Alvin gave them both bleak stares. He didn't want a push-out session, he was too tired. They had spent days in self-criticism sessions, Sturka and Cesar leading the harsh group therapy inducing them to exorcise their bourgeois conventionalisms and their individualized fears. They had lived taut, studied intensely, learned to accept discipline; now Peggy was backsliding and it was a bad time for it.

Shut up,
he thought.

Perhaps the edge of the thought struck them all because Peggy closed her mouth to a pout and did not speak. The radio droned faintly and trucks went snarling by, Mario brooded over the
Times,
Peggy chain-smoked, Cesar dozed.

Sturka returned so silently it chilled Alvin. He was inside closing the door before Alvin knew he was there.

“We'll go out tonight. It's arranged.” Sturka went around the room passing out documents.

Alvin had a look. Forged seaman's papers, a Venezuelan passport, entry visas for Spain and France and three North African countries. So that was why Sturka had needed the photos.

Sturka hitched up his trousers with the flats of his wrists. “We'll board ship tonight at Port Elizabeth—four of us, not Mario. She's a tramp under Anguillan registry. Going to Lisbon.” His eyes, hard and colorless as glass, shifted toward Mario. “You'll fly over—book a flight to Marseille on the eighth. We talked about it before. We're still agreed?”

“Well I'm scared shitless, if you want to know the truth.”

“I don't think they've made you, that's the point. We've got to know.”

“But if we're wrong they'll grab me at the airport. They'll throw away the fucking key.”

“We all admit it's a risk, Mario.”

“Well I guess we've got to try it,” Mario muttered. All through the development of the plan Mario was the one who had stayed in the shadows of the group and maintained his contacts with the pig world. Mezetti Industries thought he was engaged in market research among people his own age. It was something Mario had proposed to his father; his father had put the company's facilities at his disposal. Every week or so Mario went home, showed his face for a few days, kept his psychological alibi polished. Now it was necessary to make sure he was still free to move about. The group needed a member who could show himself openly.

Sturka was still talking to Mario: “We'll have to get you to a bank today.”

“How much you need?”

“A very great deal of money.”

“What, just to get the four of you on a tramp freighter? You figure to
buy
the fucking boat?”

“That's not what the money's needed for.” Sturka smiled his chilly anger: Mario's resistance was undisciplined.

Sturka folded his arms across his chest and his rough pitted face became sleepy as it did when he had Cesar lecture them on doctrine. “Our people are in jail. They'll be arraigned Monday morning. The politicians will bellow about law and order, there will be waves of horrified indignation across the country. If they don't find enough evidence to execute our people they'll manufacture it, but they can't afford not to execute our people. A few of the underground newspapers will try to make heroic martyrs of them, but there's a very long list of martyrs who've been destroyed by the capitalist Establishment—martyrdom means nothing any more.”

Alvin listened intently because Sturka was not given to philosophical ramblings. Sturka was getting to a point.

“And perhaps we need reminding that this operation wasn't conceived to give them martyrs.” Sturka's eyes went from face to face and Alvin was chilled. “We had a purpose. I hope we remember what it was.”

It was a mannerism: a cue, and Mario Mezetti obeyed it. “To show the world how much you can do even if you're only a small group, if you're dedicated to retaliation against the fascist pigs.”

Sturka said, “We didn't finish, did we. The purpose wasn't merely to sabotage the Capitol, the purpose was to get away with it. To show the people we could get away with it.”

“Didn't work,” Cesar said. His voice was hard, high-pitched, nasal. He was digging around his mouth with a toothpick. “And the reason it didn't work was because——”

“The people are sitting.” It was as if Sturka hadn't heard Cesar. “They're waiting, they haven't begun to move. They need a sign. Encouragement. The revolutionaries in this country are waiting for us to prove the time is right for revolution.”

Peggy blew smoke from her nostrils. “I thought we proved that by smashing the Capitol.”

“We would have. If our people had got away.” Sturka moved his hand in an arc. “They're watching. If they see the bandwagon isn't moving anywhere they won't want to jump on it. You see?” Sturka's idiomatics were odd; he had spent a great deal of time among Americans, but most of it overseas.

“So what we're going to do is get our people out.”

“With a skyhook.” Peggy was expressionless.

“We've no room for your sarcasms,” Sturka told her. “We pluck our people out—out of the country. Deliver them into asylum and watch the world jeer at Washington. That
is
the whole point. Prove how weak Washington is.” Sturka's stabbing finger sought Peggy, Cesar, Alvin, Mario; his lips formed an accidental smile. “They will react the way high-octane reacts to a lit match.”

Peggy's head turned back and forth rhythmically, disputing it. “What are we supposed to do? Buy television time, write ‘Free the Washington Seven' on shithouse walls? Raid the jail when it's probbly guarded by a whole regiment? I just don't see what you think we can——”

“Seven,” Sturka said. “Seven?”

Cesar caught it an instant before Alvin did; Cesar explained: “They got Darleen.”

Sturka absorbed it quickly and without visible reaction. “When?”

“It was on the radio when you was out. They had cops staked out at the place on Amsterdam.”

“She should have known better than to go back there.”

Cesar sat up. “The cops knew.”

“Barbara,” Sturka said absently. He was thinking.

“Maybe. But maybe they broke down those others.”

“No. None of them knew about the Harlem place.”

Cesar wasn't willing to let it go. “Line knew.”

“The hell,” Alvin said, aroused finally. “Line won't crack easy. They haven't had time to break him down.”

“I didn't say they broke him down. Maybe Line was a plant too—listen, they nailed all six of them practically on the Capitol steps,” Cesar said. “Now that was just too easy.”

“Not Line,” Alvin said. “I don't buy that.”

Sturka turned the hawked stare toward him. His voice was very quiet. “Why? Because Line is the same color as you?”

Alvin opened his mouth and closed it. Suddenly he felt defensive. Because Sturka was right.

Cesar said, “Barbara didn't know the time, she didn't even know the place. We never told her it was the Capitol. Add it up. Line's the only one who knew the program and knew about the place on Amsterdam.”

Peggy said, “Barbara knew about the Harlem place. She was there, remember?” Suddenly her head tipped back. She was facing Sturka. “You guys killed Barbara, didn't you.”

“Sure.” Cesar drawled the word slowly, pulling his head around toward Alvin. “Your soul sister finked on us.”

Alvin played it very carefully. “All right.”

Cesar shook his head. He had scored a point but he wasn't pressing it. Finally Alvin said, “I guess you had reason to believe that.”

“She was a plant,” Sturka said, as if that dismissed it.

Cesar was studying Alvin's face; Cesar gave way in the end. “She had this little toy camera in her bag and I caught her with a tin of talcum powder trying to lift Mario's prints off the bathroom glass. We left her dead for the cops to play with—we messed her up some. Maybe teach the pigs to use plants—maybe make the next one a little scared of what might happen.”

All right, Alvin thought dismally. If she betrayed them then she had it coming. He had to keep his head.

Cesar was back on Sturka. “The point is somebody finked. They got our people.”

“Barbara told them about the place on Amsterdam,” Sturka said mildly. “Nobody told them about the bombs. Line is straight.”

Alvin felt gratitude; he almost smiled at Sturka but Sturka wasn't looking at him, Sturka was explaining to Cesar what all of them should have been able to figure out for themselves: “If Line had given the pigs a tip in advance do you suppose the pigs would have stood around outside and waited for the bombs to explode? Don't you suppose they'd have evacuated the building and brought in the bomb squad? Our people must have tripped on their way out—someone made a revealing mistake at the wrong moment.”

Cesar was frowning but he curbed his tongue; presently he nodded, recognizing that was the way it had to be. “But we have to figure Barbara made us for them. They know who we are.”

“And that is why we're leaving the country tonight.”

Peggy stubbed out her cigarette. She kept grinding it into the glass ashtray long after it was extinguished. “We're going to be on every post-office wall in the country by tomorrow, we're leaving the country on a slow boat to Lisbon, and you're talking about getting Line and the rest of them out of hock. Sorry but I don't follow that.”

“Discipline doesn't require that you follow it.” Sturka opened Mario's canvas case and upended it over the bed and Mario's stock certificates cascaded into a disordered heap like bonfire kindling. “We'll trash them with these. It's fitting. Have you counted these?”

“Why?” Mario went toward the bed, suspicious.

“I have.” Sturka touched one of the certificates. It was very large and imposing, the size of
Life
magazine, the color and style of a dollar bill, and it represented one thousand shares of common stock in Mezetti Industries. Mezetti common was selling in the neighborhood of thirty-eight dollars a share.

Mario's two hundred shares of NCI were worth about eight thousand dollars. His twelve hundred shares of Coast National Oil were worth just under sixty thousand. His four thousand shares of White-side Aviation were worth about eighteen thousand. And he had altogether thirty-five thousand shares of Mezetti Industries common. All inherited from the patriarchal grandfather who had used proletarian bodies for railroad ties. The canvas bag contained something over $1,200,000 in securities and they had been carrying it around on the streets for a month because Sturka had said they might need it fast when they needed it at all.

“It's time, then,” Mario said.

Sturka began to stack the certificates neatly and slide them back into the case. “It's time.”

Mario was dubious. “You can't just take this much stock into a bank or a broker and tell him to sell it. It would knock hell out of the market. They wouldn't do it.”

“Don't sell them,” Sturka said. “Hock them.”

“For what?”

“What can you get? Half a million?”

“Probably.”

“A cashier's check. Then you take the cashier's check to another bank and break it down into a number of smaller cashier's checks. Then you go to still other banks and cash some of them.”

“How much cash?”

“At least half of it. The rest in internationally negotiable certified checks or cashier's checks.”

Mario could become shrewd in the blink of an eye when it came to finance. He had been raised in a family of financiers and the wizardry had rubbed off on him.

He latched the case. “Large bills, I guess.”

“Anything else would be too bulky. You'll have to buy money belts for us. The cheap canvas ones will do.”

“It's pig money, isn't it?” Mario grinned. “We'll use it to smash the pigs.”

“Spend an hour in a barbershop first,” Sturka adjured. “Buy a good suit of clothes. You'll need to be presentable.”

“Naturally.”

“Peggy will go with you. You may take the car. Drive it into New York and leave it in a parking garage—tear up the ticket, leave it there. The police may have a description of it from Barbara.” But the police wouldn't have the plate number; they had changed license plates on the car last night.