On a Clear Day (9 page)

Drego snorted and turned away. Mei-Mei didn’t move; she just kept
staring at Michael.

Drego got to the tiny elevators first and walked in. Mei-Mei
backed
in, still working that stare. The elevator held only four or five
people, and Michael stepped in. He was face-to-face with Drego. I got in behind him,
wondering
what the hell was going on. Drego and Mei-Mei got off on
the fourth floor, and when the door opened on the fifth, I asked Michael if he was
okay.

“Yeah, I’m all good,” he said. “I’ve
been here before.”

Where? I wondered.

Back in my room I fell across my bed, exhausted to the bone. There were
parts of me completely wasted and aching and stiff that I wished I could just discard.
Get a new body. Put the lights out. Pull the covers up. Fart in the darkness.

Me in the talk show of my mind:

“Drego thinks we should start making alliances,” Mei-Mei
was saying
.

“Fuck Drego,” I answered
.

“If it comes to a showdown, we have to know who’s got
our backs,” Mei-Mei said. “Who we can rely on.”

“Apparently we can’t rely on Drego,” I said. I
wanted to add “or you,” but I didn’t
.

“I think Drego’s right.” Mei-Mei’s voice
in the darkness sounded ominous
.

I fell asleep.

S
unday. Did we still have Sundays? Was somebody, somewhere, still washing themselves and getting ready to go to Mass? Were there mothers still twisting hair around curlers or ironing dresses so God wouldn’t be embarrassed when we showed up late?

Anja called. Michael and Drego were shouting at each other on the fifth floor. She thought we should be there.

I looked in the mirror and saw a complete mess. There was some dried saliva on my cheek, and I grabbed a towel and wiped at it. I got my jeans on and padded, barefoot, out to the staircase. I could hear Drego shouting at Michael the moment I opened the fire door. Something about “manning up.” They were in front of Michael’s room.

Drego was standing, feet apart, in the middle of the hallway. Three tourists, perhaps a man and wife and their child, stood back and watched, wondering what the hell was going on, or if they should try to pass this black man, veins prominent in his neck as he vented in the narrow corridor.

“If you’re going to be effective, you have to be ready for anything!” Drego looked fierce. Mei-Mei was a few steps behind him, flat against the wall. “You can walk into this with your eyes closed if you want, man, but anybody who can see knows you’re scared to make a move! You just don’t want to face the reality that’s staring you in the damned face!”

“I’m going my way, Drego,” Michael said calmly. “If you want to go a different way, then go. I certainly won’t try to stop you.”

“We’re either together or we’re not.” Mei-Mei’s voice sounded hoarse. “You said the biggest danger was self-destruction, that we would turn against each other. Now you’re telling Drego he can go his own way. To me, Drego is the only one with balls in this crew.”

“It doesn’t take balls to scream in a hallway,” Michael said.

“Bullshit!” This from Drego. “We could be dead by this time next year!”

“Or this time next week,” Michael said. “If your life is that important to you, then run with it.”

Drego put his shoulder against the wall and shook his head slowly. I looked at Mei-Mei, and she looked absolutely
scary. The wide face seemed wider, rounder, the porcelain skin contrasting even more brilliantly against the dark-brown eyes. I saw that she had put mascara on her lashes, dark in front and green on the edges. One small hand, fingers spread, touched the gaudy paper on the wall. She looked like an animated doll. Beautiful. Fragile. Not really human.

Drego straightened up suddenly. He looked at Michael with contempt, then started walking away.

“Drego, Roderick has invited us out for food tonight,” Michael called after him. “I’d like you to come.”

Drego continued down the hall for a few steps, then stopped. He turned and looked at Michael. “Roderick of the Sturmers?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “The Brits said that a lot of people were showing up in London. The corporations are trying to make this whole conference look like some kind of freak show. And it figures they’re going to be looking for us.”

“Why you want to go eat with Roderick?” Drego. His voice was calmer.

“Roderick wants something—maybe just to figure out who we are. I don’t know. But it’s interesting that he’s shown up here,” Michael replied. “Maybe he’s just doing a check on who’s got balls. Midnight tonight. You coming?”

“Yeah, I’ll be there.”

I remembered seeing a story on the Sturmers online. The site was profiling neo-Nazi groups. They gave his real name as Jerry Rowland. The “Roderick” came from the last Visigoth king.

“There is a tsunami, a hurricane, interlaced with tornadoes, rising from the bowels of the earth!” he had mumbled in his “down-home” role as a good ol’ boy who was “tired of being pushed around.” “It is not God-made, but man-made. We are the storm. We are the Sturmers.”

He wanted his message to strike fear in the heart of everyone who listened to him. Fool. People already knew that C-8 was running the show; what the hell did they have to fear from a bunch of misfits who called themselves the Sturmers?

What the Sturmers did to fit in was to act as mercenaries for anyone who would pay them enough to commit the violence they did, or would pay them
not
to commit violence. To the Sturmers, and to Roderick in particular, there was no conflict except with those who opposed them. Roderick himself was a big guy, broad, and always in costume. Sometimes it was some country-western outfit, other times it was his biker mode. But always with enough Nazi decorations to show he was an asshole.

We were together in Michael’s room talking about our dinner with the Sturmers. Anja texted me that we were doing too much talking. She was wrong. Drego wanted to know about Michael’s endgame.

“To get a clue as to what Roderick will do,” Michael said. “What is he trying to find out about us? Do the Sturmers have strengths we don’t know about?”

“And you’re going to get the straight scoop at one meeting?”

“With your help, with everybody’s help, I’m going to
get as much information as I can,” Michael said. “So will Roderick. He’s not inviting me here because he likes my company.”

“And if there’s violence?”

“There won’t be.” Tristan spoke up. “There wouldn’t be a meeting if he didn’t need to find out how strong we are.”

“How strong are we?” Mei-Mei asked.

“Stronger than you think,” I heard myself saying.

Mei-Mei gave me a look that was like spitting on me. I wanted to kick her ass so bad, I could taste it.

“You all right?” Tristan asked Michael.

Drego had already left, and Mei-Mei had followed him. I knew they would be talking smack about Michael as soon as they left.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Michael said.

“You sure about this meeting with Roderick?” Anja asked. “I mean … he’s known to be a sneaky SOB.”

“I’m not sure, but I think I have to take the chance,” Michael said. “I need good people with me. Drego’s a hothead, but he knows the changes.”

“I guess.” Tristan’s voice had an edge to it that I liked.

When Michael asked me to stay a minute, I was glad. Then I panicked, because I thought he might hit on me. Men do that kind of thing when they’re uptight, and I got the feeling he was getting uptight.

“Can you do a social model?” he asked. “Work Roderick into it, and maybe the Gaters as well. Everybody thinks there’s something going on, and we’re all looking at just the business side. But it could be something else.”

“Like what?”

“If the Sturmers got a new weapon, for example. How would that make things different?” Michael asked.

“A new weapon?” I asked. “C-8 already has enough firepower to keep us in line.”

“Things are beginning to move,” Michael said. “It’s clearly not a coincidence that the other groups are showing up in London.”

“You thinking something is going to go down over here?”

“No, or at least I hope not. The C-8 corporations are always watching for a chance to make a move. You know the Andover Group, and how they’re controlling twenty percent of all the energy resources in the west?” Michael sat on the sofa, stretched his legs out before him and crossed them at the ankles. “The Brits are telling me that they’re suddenly giving up their Nigerian oil interests.”

“To whom?”

“The Nigerian government,” Michael said. “That’s too sweet for it not to be a cover-up, or a diversion. There’s got to be something fishy about it.”

“Michael, straight up, are you holding back some stuff we should know?” I asked. “Because when things stop making sense …”

“That’s why the Brits are so worried,” he answered.

“They coming with us tonight?”

“No,” Michael said. “They want their own take on the situation.”

I didn’t like it, and I was feeling a little paranoid. I knew what C-8 was about, and I knew what life was becoming
for everybody. But I wanted to either do something about the shit or go back to the Bronx. I didn’t want to be a bump on anybody’s road.

At eleven, we piled into a rented van, turned on the auto-GPS, and let the vehicle make its way through the streets of England’s capital. Forty minutes later, we turned into a darkish street, the Kilburn High Road. On the left side, the Tricycle Theatre flashed a blue neon sign. Our meeting was taking place at the Black Lion.

You could hardly see “The Black Lion” printed above the windows. There were slatted blinds that shielded the interior from the public, and the heavy doors damped down the music. If you could call the crap that was blaring through the pub music. It sounded like golden oldie ska being played by a band of crackheads. The stupid
thump, thump, thump
of the bass alone was enough to make me want to leave.

The Sturmers were in their biker-cum-Viking outfits. Lots of black leather, silver studs, obscene tats, and bare arms. A big table had been put up along the wall, and I saw a huge, bearded clown waving us over the moment we came in. I figured that must be Roderick.

The whole set was carefully staged. I felt the hair on my neck stand up, and I needed to pee, only there was no way I was leaving my little group and going into a bathroom alone.

There were ten Sturmers. Six guys and four girls. They were making enough noise for twice that many.

My running talk show: I’m in the bedroom with Michael, and he talks to me about computer models while I sit on the bed in a half slip. Stupid, but sweet
.

“Here comes the posse!” Roderick throws his arm around Michael’s shoulder. “Let’s get this party started!”

Roderick. Up close he has a huge nose with large pores. He’s taller than he looked in the profile piece, maybe six feet six, a shaggy, uneven beard that is dyed red, bad teeth, and what look like acne scars. Disgusting. That’s the way the papers say he wants to look. He wants people to feel uncomfortable and turn away. He catches my eye and smiles. His lips are greasy. I don’t turn away.

A few stupid jokes from the Sturmers as we watch their girls swig down whatever it is they’re drinking. Roderick signals the waitstaff, and they disappear into the kitchen for a minute and then come out with plates of food.

“What are the girls wearing?” Anja, under her breath.

“Slut strips!” I said.

The slut strip came in around twenty years ago and apparently was hot for a while. It was just a strip of aluminum covered by two microthin layers of silver. You could glue them onto walls or your knapsack and pick up the Internet. Girls put them on their lower backs, which was supposed to make some kind of statement. To me it was just a high-tech tramp stamp. Every time a Sturmer girl moved and her blouse went up, you could see her slut strip flash.

The food. Nothing special, just lots of it. The talk around the table was really stupid and really loud.

The Sturmers were mostly downing pints of dark beer
and shots of some clear liquid. I asked one of them what it was, and he said it was embalming fluid.

“Y’all got a nice smile, lady!” he says.

I flashed him a nicer smile, thinking all the time that his down-home drawl didn’t cut it.

Nobody was talking about anything real, just a whole bunch of eating and drinking and feeling each other out. I don’t like drinking, and the cloudy cider I’d been nursing was getting my stomach upset. The Sturmer women started floating around the table. Pierced faces, makeup thrown on if they were wearing any, tight jeans, and combat boots. Some of them were missing teeth. Any one of them looked like she could be a chapter in a freaking social worker text.

Mei-Mei nudged my elbow and pointed her nose toward a broad guy with long hair who was trying to get the waitress’s attention. As he turned, I saw a sign painted on his jacket: “If You Can Read This, the Bitch Fell Off!” Hilarious. If he hadn’t already noticed, all the Sturmer women looked as if they had fallen off something. Maybe a dump truck.