Mysterium (31 page)

Clement Delafleur lost the phone line with Corporal Trebach and reached him moments later by radio. Trebach was shouting something about the barracks, about his men, but it was unintelligible in gusts of static; Delafleur told him, “Leave, for God’s sake—it doesn’t matter now! Just leave.” But there was no response. Trebach’s radio had failed, too.

Delafleur went to search for his own driver. He had fulfilled his duties with what he thought was considerable élan under pressure, and any inconvenience would soon be erased: as in the joke about doctors, he would bury his mistakes. If Trebach ran into trouble and was forced to stay, then Delafleur would be the last to leave . . . and that might impress Censeur Bisonette, who seemed to have overcome his distaste for the Ideological Branch. Delafleur was attracting patronage these days the way sugar attracts insects. It was a consoling thought.

He walked to the outer office where his chauffeur should have been. There was another radio here, tuned to the broadcast from the test bunker. It emitted a high-pitched whistle punctuated by bursts of incomprehensible data or mechanical time checks. Less than three hours to the detonation, Delafleur noted, and a little late to be leaving, but this messiness with Trebach had delayed him.

Where had the driver gone? The rest of the office was empty, of course. He had dismissed the staff, all faithful Proctors and pions, and sent them off in a midnight cortege. The driver had stayed behind, drinking black coffee from the strange cafetière in the corner. But now the room was empty.

Delafleur roamed the carpeted hallways with an increasing but carefully suppressed anxiety. He checked the toilet, but the driver wasn’t there. Nor in the empty offices, their doors all ajar, nor in the marbled foyer on the first floor. There wasn’t time for this! He was suddenly conscious of the ebbing minutes, to which he had been oblivious only an hour ago. There was snow on the roads and some of it had drifted dangerously deep. They
must
leave soon.

He heard the sound of gunfire from the west. According to Trebach’s last dispatches, that was some disturbance at the edge of town: a guardpost had exchanged gunfire with civilian automobiles, presumably refugees attempting to escape on one of the logging roads. Trebach had sent out a few more troops, and that should have ended it. But the sporadic firing went on and on—a bad sign.

Maybe the driver was in the basement, Delafleur thought, down among the water pipes and concrete walls and the steel cages where Thibault and the boy Clifford Stockton were imprisoned. But no, that wasn’t likely. In any case, Delafleur was reluctant to go down there. He was afraid of being trapped. All these walls seemed suddenly too close.

He pulled on his winter pardessus and went out through the main doors to the allée: damn the man, let him burn, he would drive the car himself if necessary! But as he hurried down the snow-rounded steps he saw that it was not just the driver who was missing. The car was gone, too.

Delafleur was mute with outrage.

He’ll pay more than three fingers for this, Delafleur thought. He’ll pay with his head! There had not been a beheading in the capital since the Depression, but there were still men in the Committees for Public Safety who knew what to do with a traitor.

But that was irrelevant; he needed transportation more than he needed revenge. No vehicles had been left behind. His cowardly chauffeur had taken the last. Delafleur felt a surge of panic but instructed himself to think, to be constructive. There was still the radio. Maybe Bisonette could send someone from the bunker. There might be time for that.

He was about to march back up the steps of City Hall when a black van came roaring around the corner past the Civic Gardens, and for a moment Delafleur felt a blossoming hope: somehow, they had come for him already! But the van had taken the corner too quickly; it wavered drunkenly from side to side and finally skidded off its wheels and over the curb.

Delafleur stared. The van was silent a moment, then armed men began to leap from the outflung doors like ants from a disturbed nest. They were soldiers, and they were obviously drunk and dangerous.

One man aimed a rifle at a streetlight, fired a single shot and sent a flurry of shattered glass to join the falling snow. The others began to shout incoherently. Not just drunken, they were also terrified. They know what’s about to happen, Delafleur thought. They know they’re doomed.

He thought:
And they know who to blame
.

A window shattered somewhere over his head. Had he been seen, here in the shadow of City Hall? Perhaps not. Delafleur ran back inside and barred the big door behind him.

CHAPTER 26

Dex didn’t like the idea of driving into gunfire, but Shepperd’s plan was the only real option: make for the logging road and pray for confusion. The snow was deep enough now to be a real impediment, bad enough on the streets of Two Rivers and certain to be worse on a one-lane track through the forest. But he would worry about that later. His first task was to pick up Clifford Stockton and his mother, and his second was to put distance between himself and the fission weapon in the Ojibway land.

Linneth sat beside him with her attention focused on the predawn gloom beyond the windows. The streetlights burned pale amber overhead. There were lights in many of these houses, as if the buildings themselves had been startled awake. Dex wondered how much of the population had been warned about the escape. Lots of the parents had been contacted, Shepperd had said. Getting kids out was a priority, and school staff had been generous with names. The black community around Hart Avenue had been nervous ever since the Proctors forced them to register as “Negroes or Mulattos” on the town rolls; that was another substantial fraction of the convoy.

But Two Rivers was too big for a genuine mass evacuation. Word had spread rapidly in the last couple of days, but there must be many who simply hadn’t heard. Dex saw them peering cautiously from the draped windows of their houses, no doubt wondering at the sound of gunfire and all the unaccustomed traffic. Dex’s car was not the only one on the road. Several sped past him, too panicked for caution, and at least one ended up in the ditch beside La Salle Avenue with its wheels spinning vainly.

Dex pulled over at the address Clifford had given him, a house not far from Coldwater Road, and left the motor running as he ran to the door. He knocked, waited, knocked again. No answer. Was it possible that Clifford and his mother had somehow
slept late
? Or left early? In desperation he pounded his fist on the door.

Ellen Stockton opened it. She wore a housecoat and her eyes were red with weeping. She held in one hand what appeared to be a mason jar of oily water—but it smelled like bathtub hooch.

Dex said, “Mrs. Stockton, I need you and Clifford in the car right away. We really don’t have time to wait.”

“They took him,” she said.

The falling snow clung to her dark hair. Her eyes were red and unfocused. Dex said, “I don’t understand—you’re talking about Clifford?
Who
took him?”

“The soldiers! The soldiers took him. So go away. Fuck you. We don’t need you. We’re not going anywhere.”

Linneth helped get the drunken woman dressed and into the car. Despite the occasional obscenity, Mrs. Stockton was too tired to fight and too intoxicated to offer more than a token objection. In the back seat she became a malleable object under a woolen blanket.

Dex sat at the wheel of the car. It was fully morning now. There were plumes of smoke all over town, Linneth saw, and still that sporadic
crack-crack
of gunfire—sometimes distant, sometimes much too close.

She said, “The boy is probably at City Hall. They have a makeshift prison there.” Unless he was dead. Which was possible, even likely. But Dex must surely know that, and Linneth didn’t want to say more in front of the mother.

The Stockton woman said something about a neighbor who had seen the soldiers taking her boy into City Hall—so at least Clifford
had
been there, not long ago.

Dex said slowly, “There may not be much of a guard. All the Proctors are gone by now. Soldiers, though, maybe.” He looked at Linneth.

She thought,
He wants me to decide
. Then:
No . . . he wants my
permission.

Because it was her life at risk, too, not just his own.

She thought,
But we might die
. But surely that was true no matter what. People were
already
dying. More would die very soon, and she would probably be among that unfortunate majority—and so what?

The Renunciates had taught her that if she died outside the Church she would be scourged by the angel Tartarouchis with whips of fire, forever. So be it, Linneth thought. No doubt Tartarouchis would be busy, with the war and all.

City Hall was five blocks behind them. She told Dex, “We should hurry,” wanting to get the words out before her courage failed.

He smiled as he turned the car around.

Symeon Demarch sat braced against the plushly upholstered rear bench of the Bureau car as his chauffeur mumbled to himself and drove at a dangerous clip east toward the highway.

Demarch had stopped thinking about Evelyn. He had stopped thinking about Dorothea, or Christof, or Guy Marris, or the Bureau de la Convenance . . . he wasn’t really thinking at all, only gazing from this sheltered space at the pine-green and cloud-gray shape of the exterior world. He faced the window, where each flake of snow that lighted would cling a moment before it slid into wind-driven dew.

“Some trouble at the military barracks,” the chauffeur said. The chauffeur was a young man with pomaded hair and a Nahanni drawl: a civilian employee, not a pion. Demarch saw the nervous way his eyes flicked to the rearview mirror.

They turned onto the highway heading south. This road connected with the route to Fort LeDuc, but it also passed the motor hotel that had been commandeered as a military garrison. Demarch said, “Is that a threat to us?”

“I don’t know, Lieutenant, but it may be. See that smoke up ahead?”

Demarch peered forward and saw nothing but snow, the same snow that sent the wheels askew whenever the car turned a corner. “Must you go so quickly?”

“Sir, if I slow down we might end up spinning our wheels for traction. I prefer a little momentum.”

“Do what you think best.”

A few moments later the driver said: “God and Samael!” And the car lurched sickeningly as he pressed the brake.

Ahead, on the left-hand side of the road, the military barracks was burning. It was a strange sight in the falling snow and Demarch was mute, marveling at it. Black smoke billowed from the many windows of what had once been the Days Inn. The flames rising from the embrasures looked almost like faces.

The road was blackened with soot but passable. “Don’t stop,” Demarch said. “Not
here,
for God’s sake!”

Then a window shattered. It was the front window, driver’s side. The chauffeur jerked and turned as if to look back, but his visible eye was full of blood. His foot convulsed against the gasoline pedal and the car bucked sharply as he slid away from the wheel.

The car rolled into a mile marker. Demarch was thrown forward by the sudden stop, and before he could right himself he saw the chauffeur’s bullet-cracked skull staining the upholstery with slurries of blood. A cold wind came through the broken window. Demarch looked past the clinging tines of glass to the pine woods opposite the burning motel, where soldiers were emerging through flags of smoke. They carried rifles. Most of their rifles were aimed at the car.

The soldiers took aim as Demarch scrambled from the right-side rear door. He was wearing his Bureau uniform; even at this distance they would know him for a Proctor. Glass exploded all around him in brittle showers, and he heard the whine of bullets and their hammering impact on the snowbound roadway. When he stood to run, he felt the bullets enter his body.

Then he was on the ground. The soldiers shouted and waved their weapons, but that sound faded into noise. Breathless, Demarch turned his head to look at the burning building. The roar of it was all around him. The fire had melted the snow into mirrors of ice: mirrors full of sky, fire, ash, the world, himself.

Clifford Stockton had slept a little during the night. Lukas Thibault had not.

Each had been given his own cage in the basement jail at City Hall. They were separated by a dusty space in a room that had once been the building’s archives. All the filing cabinets had been moved out and their contents burned when Delafleur took over the building. The walls were concrete. The ceiling was white acoustic tile. The floor was green linoleum, and it was as cold as winter earth. Clifford had learned to keep his feet off it; his snow boots were scant protection. He spent most of his time on the tiny hemp cloth cot the Proctors had provided.

He woke to the sound of Lukas Thibault’s cursing.

“I want my breakfast,” Luke was shouting. “Assholes! We’re starving down here!”

Brief silence, then the rhythmic banging of Luke’s fist against the bars. Clifford didn’t bother to look. He could see Luke’s cell only by forcing his head against the bars of his own cage and peering around an L-bend where the cages followed the wall. It wasn’t worth the effort.

He was grateful for the relative privacy. Clifford emptied his bladder into the crockery pot provided for the purpose, embarrassed by the sound. It was cold enough this morning that the pot steamed for a few minutes after he was finished.

He sat back down on the cot and wrapped the blanket around himself.

“Fuckers!” Luke was screeching. “Cretins! Bastards!”

Clifford waited until the soldier had lapsed back into silence. Then he said, “They aren’t here.”

Luke said,
“What?”
—startled, as if he had forgotten Clifford was in the basement with him.

“They’re not here!” It was obvious. For hours after dark the building had been full of sound: legions of feet upstairs, doors opening and closing, motors roaring and then fading away beyond the high, dust-clogged windows that vented the basement. “They’re gone. They evacuated. Today must be the day.”